Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Back Online!

It may appear that this BLOG has died, but we're still here! Been swamped since the DC EH 2005 conference, and spending a lot of time on non-postable work. But I wanted to give a brief update on recent events.

The NASA/DoD EH 2005 conference (Evolvable Hardware workshop) was big fun. Met a lot of people, saw a lot of familiar faces, and generally had a good time demoing the MOD 88 hardware setup. We had a 2x4 setup (16x32 cells) connected to an old laptop running Linux. Had a set of self-contained demos available, for people to run themselves, or that could be left running for others to look at when they walk by.

Jason Lohn was a huge help (actually everyone involved in setting up and running the conference was a huge help!), he had a big table for us right at the entrance to the poster area, so we had the standard easle, plus a table, plus our own easle for displaying the hardware. The whole thing took around an hour to setup the first time, but we were down to 20 minutes by the end of the conference. Here's a picture of the whole setup:



That's Murali Raju, one of the original designers of the Cell Matrix. He spent much of the day helping set things up, take things down, move things when the poster location changed, and interacting with curious on-lookers.

Here's a closeup of the boards themselves:



Some people had never heard of the Cell Matrix, and this provided a graphical, tangible way to introduce them to the architecture. Others were interested in the educational potential, which is one of the main reasons we built it. Others were interested in possibly using it for Evolvable Hardware research. Arturo Hernandez-Aguirre from CENTRO DE INVESTIGACION EN MATEMATICAS(CIMAT) bought one of the boards I'd brought to demo, and will hopefully have students working on it this fall.

Pauline Haddow from Institutt for datateknikk og informasjonsvitenskap expressed interest in the possibility of introducing hardware faults into the MOD 88 in a controlled way. More on this later...