Meeting Agenda


Date:	March 10, 2004
Location:	DC 1304
Time:	1:30 PM
Chair:	Jie Xu

1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour last week:: Olga
Coffee hour this week:: Sandrin
Coffee hour next week:: ???

3. Forthcoming

Date:	March 17	March 24	March 31	April 7
Location:	DC1304	DC1304	DC1304	DC1304
Chair:	Jack Wang	Damin Yao	Bryan Chan	Alex Clarke
Technical Presentation:	Michael Wasilewski	Jie Xu	Jack Wang	Damin Yao

4. Technical Presentation

Edwin Vane

Title: Fast Parallel Poisson Solvers

Abstract: The Poisson equation is a common occurence in many physics applications including fluid simulation and calculating electromagnetic potentials. Many algorithms solve the Poisson equation as one step in an iterative algorithm (fluid simulation for instance). Therefore, solving the Poisson equation has to be fast to reduce any possible bottlenecks. If we use parallelizable algorithms to solve the Poisson equation numerically, we can increase speed as well as open up the possibility of an implementation on graphics hardware. I will talk about some basic parallelizable methods for solving the Poisson equation including the Jacobi, Gaus-Seidel, and Domain Decomposition methods.

5. General Discussion Items

.htaccess: Somebody outside the university wanted to link to our list of conferences on the agenda (which of course is in a continual state of flux). It was suggested to use a .htaccess file to prevent Google from returning our agenda when people look for conferences. Also Mike suggested creating a separate, more fixed, page of conferences we are concerned with that could be maybe linked to. Nobody was assigned this task.
Kevin has been upgrading most of the machines in the lab to make them look more like eachother. Almost all of the machines are done now. The only ones lagging behind are fezzik, huey and inigo.
Printing should work from all linux machines now.
If you've been using gnome, your old settings may be stopping you from getting the full desktop experience. To see how to fix this, check the newsgroup posting by Stefanus.
The final surplus bin is being sent off this week. Erin wants the corner by the printers cleaned out so that we can put computers there.

6. Action List

Lab Rearrangement Update: Bill filled in for Erin with some comments. We are almost ready for the cabelling party within the lab (that is, moving computers and rewiring everything. However, two things need to happen:
- The current power system needs to be figured out; what is plugged into what and account for all the blue cables coming out of the PDS. Edwin is looking into this.
- We need a plan of where to put computers. Then we can determine where blue cables need to be laid so that every computer is plugged into the PDS in some way. Edwin and Sandrine are looking at this with Erin providing support. Anybody is free to provide input.
Visitor from York: Need to set up a date to invite William Soukoreff from York to come down and visit on a Friday. Need to find an appropriate date...

7. Conferences and Special Journal Issues

Pacific Graphics 2004

Venue: October 6-8, 2004, Seoul, Korea
Full paper submission: April 30, 2004
Notification of acceptance: June 25, 2004
Camera-ready copy due: July 23, 2004
Conference URL: http://graphics.snu.ac.kr/pg2004

8. Directors' Meeting

At the directors meeting this week we

1. Flushed our queue of items dating back to Dec 3.
2. Discussed hiring a lab manager for the summer.

9. Seminars and Events

Monday, 8 March 2004, 10:30AM - Computer Science , DC 1304: Stefan Saroiu: -- Content Delivery in the Modern Internet
Monday, 8 March 2004, 3:30PM - Computer Science , DC 1304: M. Jason Hinek: -- Some Dangers of Third Party RSA Key Generation
Thursday, 11 March 2004, 10:30AM - Computer Science , DC 1304: Ihab Ilyas: -- Rank-aware Query Processing and Optimization
Friday, 12 March 2004, 2:00PM - Computer Science (Databases Group), DC 1331: Lei Chen: -- On the Marriage of Lp-norms and Edit Distance