SIPB Cluedump Series 2011
From SIPB Cluedumps
SIPB Cluedumps are informal technical talks, well supplied with snacks. Interrupt with questions at any time, or quietly get up for food.
Cluedumps will run at 8pm on Tuesday evenings, starting September 14th. The December 7th slot is still open! Feel free to email the Cluedump Series organizers at cluedumps at obvious dot edu with any questions. For weekly announcements, blanche yourself onto cluedump-announce, or mail us and we'll add you.
Day/location: Sept 14 in 3-133 Title: Scripts Presenter: Edward Yang Description: Scripts is SIPB’s shared hosting service for the MIT community. However, it does quite a bit more than your usual $10 host: what shared hosting services integrate directly with your Athena account, replicate your website on a cluster of servers managed by Linux-HA, let you request hostnames on *.mit.edu, or offer automatic installs of common web software, let you customize it, and still upgrade it for you? Scripts is a flourishing development platform, with over 2600 users and many interesting technical problems.
Day/location: Sept 21 in 3-133 Title: Audio/Video Compression Presenter: Keith Winstein Description: Coming Soon
Day/location: Sept 28 in 3-133 Title: Unicode and Character Encodings Presenter: Nelson Elhage Description: Do you get email with subject lines like "???? ?????? ??? ????"? Does your Python code throw mysterious UnicodeError's because someone tried to put a "♥" in their name? Are you totally clueless about the difference between UTF-8 and UCS-2? Do you wish that you could write code that handled unicode properly, but are stuck randomly sticking calls to encode and decode until something works right? If so, this is the talk for you. I'll explain everything you need to know about unicode, character sets, and text encoding, and leave you with enough of an understanding to go forth and confidently write programs that handle multi-lingual text.
Day/location: Oct 5 in 4-231 Title: How to Talk to People Presenter: Liz Denys, Cathy Zhang, Karen Sittig Description: Do you frequently find yourself in awkward situtations (sometimes/usually as a result of your input)? Do you make other people uncomfortable when you join a conversation? Do you wish you knew how to talk to people? At this Cluedump, we will teach you the basics of communication with other homo sapiens sapiens so that you can achieve more signal-to-noise in all of your conversations, whether it's with friends or with interviewers.
Day/location: Oct 12 in 4-231 Title: Virtualization Presenter: Geoffrey Thomas Description: Coming Soon
Day/location: Oct 19 in 4-231 Title: Ethical Issues in Technology Presenter: Danny Clark Description: Coming Soon
Day/location: Oct 26 in 4-231 Title: How Real-time Graphics Work in 2010 Presenter: Jiawen "Kevin" Chen Description: Do you ever wonder how games are actually rendered? Why is it that my OpenGL program runs so slowly on my expensive video card? How do I know if I'm efficiently using my graphics hardware? This cluedump answers these questions by going into how real-time graphics applications are actually written with modern APIs. We begin with a short introduction to graphics hardware architecture. We will then discuss how the OpenGL and Direct3D APIs in 2010 target this architecture, highlighting the enormous differences from their initial design almost 20 years ago. The session will be interactive with plenty of time for questions and live programming.
Day/location: Nov 2 in 4-231 Title: LaTeX Presenter: Jason Gross Description: LaTeX is a document preparation system especially well-suited for technical and mathematical documents. It is an extension, written by Leslie Lamport, to Donald Knuth's TeX. I will explain briefly why LaTeX is the most popular language for typesetting mathematical and scientific papers. I will begin with the basics of LaTeX, how to install it, and what it is and is not. I intend to teach you everything you'll need to know to typeset your psets and/or notes. As time allows, I'll describe some of the more advanced features of LaTeX, such as drawing pictures, making slide-shows, and it's powerful macro language. I'll end by handing out exercises (http://web.mit.edu/jgross/www/LaTeX/exercises.pdf) which will help you become comfortable with typesetting math in LaTeX.
Day/location: Nov 9 in 4-231 Title: Introduction to Data-Parallel GPU Programming with CUDA Presenter: Jiawen "Kevin" Chen Description: Processor design very quickly approached a wall in the early 21st century. Due to power constraints, we can no longer increase clock speeds on processors while shrinking transistor sizes. The only way to increase performance today is to add additional processors, which demands a fundamentally parallel programming model. Although there are numerous forms of parallelism, "data parallelism" is by far the easiest to understand and exploit. The latest generations of graphics processing units (GPUs) are architectures designed for high performance on data-parallel tasks. This cluedump gives a tutorial on how to program a modern NVIDIA GPU using the CUDA API, with motivating examples in data analysis, image processing, and scientific computation. The session will be interactive with plenty of time for questions and live programming.
Day/location: Nov 16 in 4-231 Title: C++: A case study in object-oriented language implementation Presenter: Greg Brockman, David Benjamin Description: Have you found yourself wondering how the compiler knows which version of a virtual method to call? Do you believe that multiple inheritance is the world's greatest evil? Come learn about the design and implementation of C++, a widely used object-oriented language. Familiarity with object orientation and basic C syntax will be assumed.
Day/location: Nov 23 in 4-231 Title: A Grumpy Fuzzball's Guide to Talking to Girls Presenter: Liz Denys, Cathy Zhang, Karen Sittig Description: Genetically speaking, girls may only differ from you by one chromosome, but in this 1/46th of what makes us human lies a world of difference. If you've ever wondered about how to communicate with the fairer sex, this is the cluedump for you. Come learn about the historical gender role of women, how to engage a woman in polite conversation, and how to take it to the next level with a friend. No judgment, just learning.
Day/location: Nov 30 in 4-231 Title: (Deb)athena Under the Hood Presenter: Jonathan Reed Description: Athena has been a fixture at MIT for over 25 years. During that time, it has evolved from a radical academic computing experiment to the Institute's primary distributed computing environment. Over the years many new components and platforms were added and others were removed. Most recently, Debathena replaced Athena 9.4 as the primary version of Athena. I'll cover the various components of Athena (Kerberos, AFS, Moira, Hesiod, etc), notable changes over the years, and enhancements Debathena added to the cluster environment. This talk will cover some of the material from previous cluedumps on Athena (2007, 2008) but will also introduce new material, and speculate about what Athena may look like in the future. Bio: Jonathan Reed '02 is a SIPB prospective and Senior Student Liaison in IS&T's Faculty and Student Experience (FSX) group, where he spends more time working on Athena than originally planned.
