Sun Events at NCSU

Sun Microsystems with ACM/AITP present the Sun Spot!

Alex Ronke and I (Anita Sivakumar) joined up with the local ACM/AITP chapter here at our University. ACM is the Association of Computing Machinery and it is run by students in order to bring together people who are pursuing paths that involve computers. At their latest meeting, they allowed us to showcase the Sun Spot. Our sales representative, Skip Vail, had organized a donation of Spots from Sun to Dr. Fornaro's class. These students then turned around and used these sun spots for a variety of different things they had been working on this past school year. They showed off their projects at this event.


One view of the audience

The meeting began with the president of the ACM chapter addressing what would be happening during the meeting and introducing Alex and I. We intorduced who we are and what we did. We gave our basic overview of what we wanted to share at the meeting today as well and then the real fun began!

First, David Simmons, one of the creators behind Sun Spots began by talking about the work done in Sun Labs. He also introduced sun spots to the audience and talked about how they were created.

Dr. Fornaro then introduced what the students were doing in their class this semester. He explained that there were individual student researchers as well as two main groups: a hardware group and a software group. He also told the audience about how he found out about sun spots. The students then took the lead and began with their presentations.


Dr. Fornaro addresses the audience

The first student used sun spots to look at how many data packets were lost while they were sending information to one another, based on proximity and interference. He lined up 6 sun spots and sent data back and forth between them. His program then showed us how many packets were lost.

Cameron and Chris were next. They were part of the ECE team which came from a hardware point of view. They looked at spots by attaching a gps sensor to the spots and tracking them on a map. They then created a gui that has tabs for each spot and also said they were going to look into trying to calculate the number of hops between different areas.

Lastly, Zach presented the software group's project. This team looked into a geocasting protocol, with packets addressed by geographic region rather than a port number or MAC address.


Zach talks about his group's project

We then retired to go eat pizza and rejoined up to do prizes. We gave out water-bottles, shirts, and some copies of Solaris 10 Enterprise edition. Lastly, we also gave away a $100 Best Buy gift card!


Another view of the audience

Our next event will be an event a Solaris installation fest and presentation. Look for details coming up soon!

Posted at 03:15PM Apr 10, 2007 by anita0ncsu in Sun  |  Comments[0]