====== SIG BUILD ======
===== Officers =====

   * Student Adviser - Professor M. Theys
   * President - Robert Blackwood
   * Vice President - Andrew Sennebogen
   * Systems Administrator - Walter Dworak

===== Proposals and Purchases =====

=== Organization proposal ===
[[http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~rblack6/sigbuild/SIGBUILDproposal.pdf]] \\

=== Spring 2010 Order proposals ===
[[http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~rblack6/sigbuild/sigbuild_proposal_100204.pdf]] \\

=== Spring 2010 Final order list (submitted to CS dept) ===
[[http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~rblack6/sigbuild/acmsigbuildrequisitionlist.pdf]] \\

=== Fall 2010 Order list ===
[[http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~rblack6/sigbuild/sigbuild_shopping_list_monitor_wall.pdf]] \\

===== Hardware 101 =====
=== Hardware Guides ===

[[http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~rblack6/sigbuild/SIGBUILDguide.pdf]] \\
[[http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~rblack6/sigbuild/SIGBUILDguide1.pdf]]

=== Inventory ===
[[http://linux.cs.uic.edu/inventory/]]

===== Projects =====

==== VRUPL Lab ====

PROJECT LEADER: Armando Diaz

DESCRIPTION: Dr. Bell's VRUPL lab is in need of repair and networking.  We are going to assist in getting the lab into working condition.

=== Status ===

Date - Activity Performed

==== COMPLETED: New AD Server aka "dvorak" ====

PROJECT LEADER: Walter Dworak

DESCRIPTION: Moving the DCHP and ADDC roles, and other services to a new Windows Server Machine. The old machine is running Windows Server 2008 and the new machine is running Windows Server 2008 R2, so the change should not be as hard as moving from an NT4or5 to NT6 or moving from an NT based system to linux.

PURPOSE: The current machine charged with these roles, amadeus, is not meeting the necessary performance requirements to be a reliable sever, so the jobs are being moved to a new machine. 

FURTHER READING: Any Microsoft documents related to moving Server roles between NT6 systems, and any other relevant documents from other sources. 


=== Status ===

All tasks are completed.

==== P4 Cluster ====

PROJECT LEADER: Andrew Sennebogen

DESCRIPTION: ACCC P4 machines have been networked together in a commodity (Beowulf) computing cluster.

PURPOSE: The experience of building, maintaining, and utilizing a working computing cluster - including (but not limited to): netbooting, networking, MPI, parallelization of algorithms, UNIX, etc.

FURTHER READING: Computer Cluster ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_%28computing%29]])

=== Status ===

Date - Activity Performed


==== CUDA Machine ====

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 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.

FURTHER READING: Compute Unified Device Architecture ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA]])

=== Status ===

Date - Activity Performed


==== Supercomputer ====

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: //Josh Herman// - The Chicago-01 supercomputer project is a research oriented supercomputer. Its primary goals are to investigate the following: Run code such as PHCPack (the implementation of polynomial homotopies exploiting structure in order to better approximate all isolated solutions) or basically find an optimal solution for hard polynominal systems. Another goal is to perform research on a novel network architecture utilizing artin braid groups as a algebra of networks. This will allow for the addition and subtraction of nodes in the network to be topologically invariant by the use of concatenation of the artin braid group. The last goal is to explore the use of GPU and possibly reconfigurable computing architectures like FPGA gates for the optimization of tasks on the supercomputer.

=== Status ===

Date - Activity Performed


==== Monitor Wall ====

PROJECT LEADER: Andy Urquiaga

DESCRIPTION: The EVL (Electronic Visualization Labratory) donated a monitor wall, containing 30 monitors, to SIG-Build.  The entire SIG has given input on this project to get the monitors synced and running.

PURPOSE: To have a fully functioning monitor wall for the Computer Science department at UIC to use and practice/apply SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) programming on.

FURTHER READING: Information on SAGE: [[http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&type=1&indi=281]]

=== Status ===

Date - Activity Performed

Andrew Sennebogen Currently has installed Ubuntu Linux on all servers with help form Walter Dworak. Currently we ran into a prablem: 4 video cards have single inputs when the monitor wall requires two input capability.  Projected completion time: mid-Febuary

===== Schedules =====