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:

• Support software for writing (or learning how to write) parallel applications:
  • OO_MPI_IO, a set of C++ abstractions that simplify the MPI-IO parallel I/O mechanism.
  • TSGL: The Thread Safe Graphics Library, a C++ library for creating real-time visualizations of the behaviors of the different threads in a multithreaded application.
  • TSAL: The Thread Safe Audio Library, a C++ library for creating real-time sonifications of the behaviors of the different threads in a multithreaded application.
  • The Patternlets, a set of minimalist, syntactically correct programs, each illustrating the behavior of a parallel programming design pattern.
• High Performance Beowulf clusters, which are distributed multiprocessors built from commodity, off-the-shelf hardware, providing performance far exceeding that of a typical desktop. These projects include:
  • Borg, a 2018 tera-scale cluster for multidisciplinary high performance computing.
  • Dahl, a 2008 tera-scale cluster for multidisciplinary high-performance computing.
  • Microwulf, a 2006 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.
  • Ohm, a 2001 giga-scale cluster for multidisciplinary high-performance computing.
  See our HPC at Calvin page for more details about these and other clusters.
• Computer science education: how the process of teaching computer science can be improved. Some of my projects in this area include:
  • Writing textbooks. I have been the lead author on several textbooks seeking to make introductory computing easier for novices.
  • Using Alice and Scratch to teach the ideas of programming to young people. From 2006-2016, I directed the Imaginary Worlds Camps, in which middle school students used these tools to create computer-generated animated movies and/or games, and learn the basics of programming at the same time. I have also written some Alice-related books:
    1. Alice 3 in Action,
    2. Alice 3 in Action with Java,
    3. Alice in Action, and
    4. Alice in Action with Java.
  • Using Lego Mindstorms robots to teach Java programming.
  • PITA (Platform Independent Testing Application) is an on-line testing tool that allows tests to be created and given anywhere on the Internet (currently suspended until we find funding).

• 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.