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SIG Build

About

SIG Build began in Fall 2009, when a few rogue ACM members began rummaging through the stray parts lying around the office in order to build working machines. This activity persisted, and eventually snowballed into a full-fledged SIG in Spring 2010.

Since then, SIG Build has become one of UIC-ACM's most active SIGs. Its focus is on computer hardware (the physical architecture of computing devices and networks) & the software that it interacts with (operating systems, low-level languages, etc.).

SIG Build meets SEL-E 2264 (next door to the ACM office).

* except when there is a conflicting ACM event

Officers

  • Student Adviser - Professor M. Theys
  • President - Andrew Sennebogen
  • Vice President -
  • Systems Administrator - Walter Dworak

Active Projects

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(Project 1 of 3)

Monitor Wall

       

Project Leader: Andrew Sennebogen

Description: We have acquired the EVL's old LCD monitor wall and most the servers used to drive it. Last Year we got 30 of the monitors and 15 computers running (all we had at the time) running the wall.

Current Status: Pictures are worth a thousand words...

At the end of last semester we acquired the rest of the 55 monitors that were the original lambda vision wall. We only got enough of the computers to drive up to 50 of them. We have gotten budgeting approved to get parts necessary to drive the rest of the monitors, but are waiting for the budget to go into effect to order the parts.

Further Reading:

Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment
Linux network booting
Category 6 cable
SAGE Full Documentation


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(Project 2 of 3)

CUDA Machine

Cuda Machine
photo taken by Anne Celestino

Project Leader: Jeremy Ervin

Description: The CUDA machine is a PC built with 4 high-end NVIDIA graphics cards installed. The goal is to harness the tremendous computational power of these GPUs to do parallel computing.

Purpose: This project serves as a platform for computer science students at UIC to learn about parallel programming and GPU computing.

Current Status: If anyone is interested in GPU programming and would like to get involved with CUDA, please send us a message on the SIG Build mailing list.

Further Reading:

Compute Unified Device Architecture (wiki)

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(Project 3 of 3)

Supercomputer

Supercomputers

Project Leader: Josh Herman

Description: Two supercomputers were donated to ACM member Josh Herman by professor Jan Verschelde. Josh is working to get these clustered and up and running as part of a research project.

Purpose: Independent Study / Research Project

Current Status:Tinycore Linux Installed on 64MB CF card, confirmed working in other machine, does not currently work on Xeon cluster.
PXE enabled on one of the Xeon boards.
One of the systems is undergoing some final work before a return to Jan Verschelde's office.