Computer Science | Grinnell College

This week in CS table, we will read the first major paper on RAID (not the bug spray, but the disk technology - Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks). This classic paper not only led computer scientists to think differently about storage, but also saw wide adoption in the real world. Copies are available outside Professor Rebelsky's office.

Patterson, D. A., Gibson, G., and Katz, R. H. 1988. A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID). In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD international Conference on Management of Data (Chicago, Illinois, United States, June 01 - 03, 1988). H. Boral and P. Larson, Eds. SIGMOD '88. ACM, New York, NY, 109-116. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=50202.50214.

Increasing performance of CPUs and memories will be squandered if not matched by a similar performance increase in I/O. While the capacity of Single Large Expensive Disks (SLED) has grown rapidly, the performance improvement of SLED has been modest. Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), based on the magnetic disk technology developed for personal computers, offers an attractive alternative to SLED, promising improvements of an order of magnitude in performance, reliability, power consumption, and scalability. This paper introduces five levels of RAIDs, giving their relative cost/performance, and compares RAID to an IBM 3380 and a Fujitsu Super Eagle.

Computer science table is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Fridays from 12:10-12:50 in the Day PDR (JRC 224A). Contact Sam Rebelsky, rebelsky@grinnell.edu, for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

The Glimmer Labs pages are currently under development.

The Grinnell Laboratory for Interactive Multimedia Experimentation and Research, aka "Glimmer" aka "Glimmer Labs" is a research laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at Grinnell College. Samuel A. Rebelsky serves as the director of Glimmer Labs, which has a host of student researchers.

Current Research Projects

Glimmer Labs currently supports two primary research projects. In the Mediascripting project, we are building tools and resources to explore interactive scripting of media applications. While our emphasis is on using functional approaches to scripting, we support a variety of languages and paradigms. In the CSG-CS2 project, we are building a curriculum for data structures and algorithms that emphasizes computing for social good.

Historical Information

From 1997 to 2006, the research focus of Glimmer Labs was interactive hypermedia, particularly targeting the World Wide Web. The three main projects of Glimmer Labs at the time were Project Clio, a suite of resources to gather and analyze information about student Web usage, SiteWeaver, a tool suite for building Web sites, and TrailBlazer, a tool set for annotating and linking arbitrary Web pages. All of those projects have been discontinued.

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[ Glimmer | People | github | CSG-CS2@github ]

It's never to soon to think about what you're going to do next summer! While summer may seem far away, taking advantage of some of the better summer opportunities requires advance planning—for example, some programs have deadlines in January or February.

On Thursday, December 6, Professor Sam Rebelsky will discuss typical off-campus summer options available in computer science—research, internships, and more—and suggest strategies for developing your applications. (At a separate session early next semester, the CS faculty will describe summer research opportunities available at Grinnell.)

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Professor Rebelsky's presentation will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On November 10, the computer science department's faculty will discuss summer opportunities for computer science students.

It's never to soon to think about what you're going to do next summer! While summer may seem far away, taking advantage of some of the better summer opportunities requires advance planning - for example, some programs have deadlines in January or February.

At this session, members of the CS department and the Career Development Office will discuss typical summer options available in computer science - research, internships, and more. They will also suggest strategies for developing your applications. At a separate session, to be held early next semester, the CS faculty will describe summer research opportunities available at Grinnell.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). the talk and discussion will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On Thursday, February 3, faculty in the Department of Computer Science will discuss summer research opportunities, both on and off campus, that are open to our students, including the projects that our faculty will direct this year.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The discussion will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. We encourage anyone who might be interested in summer research in computer science to attend!

It's the week after break. We think that you're up to something a bit deeper and a bit more challenging. Hence, we're going to read the first major paper on RAID (not the bug spray, but the disk technology). Copies are available outside Professor Rebelsky's office.

Patterson, D. A., Gibson, G., and Katz, R. H. 1988. A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID). In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD international Conference on Management of Data (Chicago, Illinois, United States, June 01 - 03, 1988). H. Boral and P. Larson, Eds. SIGMOD '88. ACM, New York, NY, 109-116. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=50202.50214.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

Students work with faculty on a range of research and development projects. Much activity takes place in the summer, when Grinnell College provides fine support to students (stipend, credits). Other work takes place during the regular semester. Although not complete, the following listing illustrates many of the projects involving student-faculty collaborations.

Fall, 2013

Designing Technology for Wellness Behaviors
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Bluetooth Communication with C.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2013

Designing Technology for Wellness Behaviors
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Scene text image binarization.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Scene text word guideline detection.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Fall, 2011

Refining C-based Materials Supporting Robots.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2011

Scene text image normalization.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Using Robots in CSC 161: an Exploration.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Improving User Experience for the Local Food Coop Web Site
Faculty Director: Janet Davis

Fall, 2010

Multi-device GPU learning
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Text recognition and alignment of historical maps.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Placement of Incoming Students in Computer Science, Statistics, and Mathematics.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2010

Persuasive Web Communities
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Text recognition in historical maps.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Fall, 2009

User-centered software development.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2009

GPU learning and character recognition.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Designing multifactor experiments.
Faculty directors: Shonda Kuiper and Samuel A. Rebelsky

Interactive media scripting.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Visual category recognition.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Spring, 2009

Compression algorithms and techniques.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Software Development for an Interactive, Accessible Campus Map.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2008

Participatory design of ambient pervasive technology.
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Summer, 2007

Higher-order media computation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Usable functional media computation.
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Spring, 2007

Restoring Greek.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Summer, 2006

Functional multimedia.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Functional approaches to multimedia.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Scripting, databases, and the Web.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

Visualizing multivariate data.
Faculty director: Shonda Kuiper

Fall, 2005

Experiments in programming languages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 2005

Syndication software development.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Automating athletic recruiting.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

Spring, 2005

Arjun Guha 2006: Compiling functional languages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Fall, 2004

Automating athletic recruiting.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

Summer, 2004

Automated group scheduler.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Freedweb: a peer-to-peer Web server.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Automating athletic recruiting.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

A stand-alone spam filter.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Web mediation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Spring, 2004

Ray tracing.
Faculty director: David Bishop

Fall, 2003

Advanced Java development.
Faculty director: David Bishop

Robotic art.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 2003

Educational Web technology.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Visualizing Web data.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Web mediation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Spring, 2003

Online football statistics and commentary in real time.
Faculty director: David Bishop

Heuristics for Tutorial placement.
Faculty director: Ben Gum

Computerizing Room Draw.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Auto glossary linking.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Fall, 2002

A multi-protocol mail client.
Faculty director: David Bishop

Summer, 2002

Massive data computation.
Faculty director: Ben Gum

Data mining Web usage logs.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Clio's worlds: 3D visualizations of personal Web logs.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Web mediation tools (Web Raveler).
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 2001

Web Raveler: reconfiguring Web pages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Clio: analyzing Web navigation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Annotations: attaching notes and comments to Web pages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 2000

Clio: analyzing Web navigation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Web Raveler: reconfiguring Web pages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Preserving static locations in changing documents through structural analysis and string approximation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Spring, 2000

FLIP: an extended study in software design.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Summer, 1999

Project Ravel: An architecture for reconfiguring web pages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Interactive facilities for networked hypertexts.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Evaluating the variability of ratings of conference papers.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

A neural network to place incoming students.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

Siteweaver: Tools for building and supporting large-scale hypertexts.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 1998

Siteweaver: Tools for building and supporting large-scale hypertexts.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Animated algorithms on the World Wide Web.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Spring, 1994

Software design and implementation: GNU sed.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Developing a Scheme interpreter.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Summer, 1994

An expert system to place incoming students in mathematics and computer science.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 1993

Grinnell Scheme.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Spring, 1993

A character-recognition system.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Functional programming languages.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Computational linguistics.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Summer, 1990

A German spelling checker.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Fall, 1988

Denotational semantics.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Spring, 1984

Recognizing printed characters.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Data retrieval and file tools: DRAFT-11.
Faculty director: John David Stone

MAX (1982-1990)

At different times, students contributed to the development of a matrix computation package that was published in 1988 by Brooks/Cole as MAX -- the MAtriX Algebra Calculator. Professor Gene Herman is the principal author of the package and directed the students' contributions. Professor Herman and Professor Charles Jepsen wrote the text of the book.

The Core System (1979-1981)

Several students worked with Professor Gene Herman to create device-independent graphics subroutines in FORTRAN and Pascal, implementing a 1978 proposal (Bergeron, R. Daniel; Bono, Peter R.; and Foley, James D., Graphics programming using the Core system, ACM computing surveys 10 [December, 1978], pp. 389-443) for a graphics standard.

You Solved It! (1979-1981)

Under the direction of Professor Gene Herman, several students developed a collection of computer-aided instruction programs providing drill and practice in precalculus mathematics.

Students and faculty work together on many Mentored Advanced Projects (MAPs) and other scholarly endeavors, both during the academic year and in the summers. For example, about a dozen students work as research/development teams with faculty in a typical summer. Some on-going projects include:

• Software performance and effective cache use
• Program reasoning in the computer science curriculum and semi-automated programming
• Fostering inclusivity in early computer science activities for youth
• Evolution simulations for research and education
• Extracting meaning from images, such as character recognition in historical maps

Christine Wang '08 presents two posters at ITiCSE 2007 in Dundee Scotland, based on work with students Monica Ugwi, Eric Omwega, and Jonathan Tsu and with faculty member Henry Walker.