Welcome to the new homepage for CIS(THeTa): The Computing & Information Science THink Tank at Baldwin High School! CIS(THeTa) is the home of the cistheta2008 team, our Computer Science IndependentStudy (CSI) class.

What's new this year is ShadowFax - a linux cluster or super computer comprised of 24 compute nodes each with dual-core AMD Athlon 64-bit processors. Each compute node is a PC running at 2 GHz per core with 750 MB RAM, 120 GB Hard Disk and switched GigaBit Ethernet.

The result of our first experiment, povray's chess2.pov, is shown on this page. We produced chess.ppm in under 3 minutes using all 48 cores. This plot is 4000 horizontal pixels by 2700 veritcal pixels (just over 10 megapixels) with a 3 byte (24-bit) color depth (RGB pallete with over 16 million possible colors). The size of chess.ppm is over 30MB. On this page we have uploaded chess2.jpg which is only about 750KB. We converted from ppm to jpg via The GIMP.

Next year, we may also be able to use ShadowFax in our new Calculus Research Lab (CRL) for Scientific Computing using Sage, Octave and R.

We are very interested in new research areas openning up in fields that benefit from Computing Science: Scientific Computing (Physics & Chemistry), Bioinformatics (BioMath, Protein Folding, Genome), Econometrics (Economics, Statistics, Probability), Multimedia (povray, fractals, graphics, animation) as well as brute force number crunching (SETI, Large Mersenne Primes, etc).

See our old cluster page at: http://www.zazzle.com/cistheta2007

Enjoy!