For the past 2 years, I've worked on developing Marquette University's campus grid (MUGrid) with faculty and students across campus. I initially started this work to have enough resources for my bioinformatics research, but it has taken on a life of its own.

During break, Pools of Virtual Boxes (http://poolsofvirtualb.sourceforge.net), a project developed at Marquette, was updated to support multi-core machines. Because of that update and reimaging of the MSCS and College of Engineering Labs, we now have over 500 cores available for research applications. In addition, our NSF funded cluster consisting of 1024 cores arrived and will be brought online in the coming months.

The great news is that now, not only do I have a resource for large scale bioinformatics, Marquette faculty and students are also pursuing drug design applications, biomedical imaging, large scale modeling, data mining, and many other opportunities.

I'm looking forward to a great 2010 and seeing MUGrid used for amazing discoveries.

I was recently reading some technical documentation from a popular vendor when I came across the following:

Using the "*" joker
When invoking a command, you can use the character "*" as a joker to select all the nodes with matching node names.

I found one other usage like this with Google. It's interesting how words can sometimes be translated.

The CRA has posted a number of interesting videos related to computer science research and how it has changed the world. Take a look at

http://www.youtube.com/user/computingresearch

to see the videos. The "Human Computation" session was one I particularly enjoyed.