Professional Interests (Joel Adams)
My professional interests include both
teaching and scholarship
(consisting of
published work and
professional activities).
If there is a general theme to my scholarship,
it is in reducing the level of frustration involved in dealing
with computers.
Specific areas of interest include:
-
High Performance
Beowulf clusters:
Designing distributed multiprocessors that provide
computing performance beyond what a typical desktop can provide.
Two recent projects are:
-
The Dahl Project
is building a tera-scale cluster
for multidisciplinary high-performance computing.
-
Microwulf
is a personal, portable cluster
providing over 26 Gflops of measured performance
for less than $2500
-- significant computational power
at a price nearly any college or university can afford.
-
Computer science education: how
the process of teaching computer science can be improved.
Some of my projects in this area include:
-
Methodologies that produce more reliable and easier to maintain
software.
Applied object-oriented programming,
which currently seems to hold some promise in this area.
Some of my projects in this area include:
-
Extensions to
ooMPI:
a project is to apply object-oriented techniques
to high-performance computing, so that HPC programs are
less work to write.
-
ooMindstorms: A software library supporting
object-oriented control of Lego Mindstorms robots.
-
Cliser,
a system to generate object-oriented source code
for client server systems.
-
Fault-tolerant systems in general, and specifically
networks and distributed systems that can identify and
reconfigure around faulty components.
-
Human-computer interfaces sufficiently simple
that the average person can use them, without
having to consult a manual.
As Christian, I am also interested in the relationship between
computing and Christianity.
I've collected some serious and not so serious links on
Christianity and computing.
Joel Adams —
Professional