Few people know that Princeton University’s association with computers and computing predates the ENIAC. Jon goes back to the days of John von Neumann, Oswald Veblen, Alan Turing, John Tukey, and winds his way forward through the memorable days of the mainframes to 1985 when Ira Fuchs arrived to create the University’s high speed network and begin the drive toward ubiquity of access and use. His many stories all have one thing in common… they all used to be funny. About the speaker: Jon Edwards graduated from Princeton in 1975 with a degree in history. He got his PhD…
The following articles were authored by Jon Edwards
The last decade has witnessed a rapid emergence of larger and faster computing systems in the US. Massively parallel machines have gone mainstream and are now the tool of choice for large scientific simulations. Keeping up with the continuously evolving technology is quite a challenge though. Scientific applications need to be modified, adapted, and optimized for each new system being introduced. In this talk, the evolution of a gyrokinetic particle-in-cell code developed at Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory is presented as it was adapted and improved to run on successively larger computing platforms. About the speaker: Dr. Stephane Ethier…
In its youth, which seems only now to be ending, film-making and film-editing required an immense amount of expensive and specialized hardware and a hefty range of fine technical skills. Today, suggested Dave Hopkins and Jim Grassi at the October 27 Lunch ‘n Learn, even teenagers with affordable hand-held devices can shoot, edit, and even distribute films for the mass market. Be sure to run through their slides which contain a range of clips that tell the story through film. There you can watch Francis Ford Coppola predicting in the 1970s that children would someday be able to make…
Wikipedia, said David Goodman at the October 13 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, is by far the most used online encyclopedia, and the most referenced source in the world, with more than 338 million unique visitors a month. It contains articles in more than 260 languages, has an impressive geographic reach, and extensive coverage of topics, currently with more than 16 million articles and 5 million illustrations and media files. It owes its success as a modern, comprehensive, encyclopedia, and its challenges, to its five pillars. It is designed for its online environment, it has a neutral point of view (which sometimes requires…
All who listen to Jerry Ostriker, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, come to know that we live in profoundly exciting times. We have learned only recently the age and composition of the universe, and for the first time, we are coming to understand how the galactic structures we observe throughout the sky came to be. Simply put, where do they come from, and how could they form if the early universe was relatively uniform? And how can we use them as standard objects unless we understand how and when they formed and how they evolved? One of…
Welcome to the new IT’s Academic blog! Most of the writing and all of the keywording (is that a word?) are mine. The photography is Lorene Lavora’s. But this latest incarnation of this blog owes its look and feel and remarkable functionality to Michael Muzzie, Senior Web Developer in OIT’s Academic Services. It is our collective hope that members of the University community will like what they see here and then contact Michael to start their own blogs! For more than 15 years, Princeton University has sponsored a series of technology seminars. Part of the outreach efforts of its IT department,…
Ten years ago, Princeton adopted Blackboard as its course management system. During the past decade, the system has moved from serving a handful of courses to every course. What was an occasional convenience has become an integral part of the educational process at Princeton. In June, the University will be upgrading the system to Blackboard 9. New features promise to improve teaching, learning, and course management. The most striking change initially, though, for instructional staff and builders, will be the new interface for editing and managing the course sites….
For reunions last year, OIT created a special web site tailored for the small mobile devices that are now proliferating in the marketplace, cell phones with web browsers, iPhones, Blackberries, and the like. The experiment proved to be quite successful. To accelerate the development of such services, OIT signed an agreement in December that will give the University access to Blackboard Mobile, an environment that will permit users to access public information about the University in a format especially suited to such mobile platforms. The result will soon be a Princeton-specific application, m.Princeton, for leading brands of smart phones….
In the Fall term of 2009, Princeton conducted a pilot sponsored by the High Meadows Foundation, the University Library, and the Office of Information Technology, to assess the use of e-readers in the classroom. The reader used was the Amazon Kindle DX, a lightweight, portable e-reader with the capacity to hold approximately 3500 books, in three University courses. The project aimed to explore the use of the e-readers in classes for which e-reserves were the primary readings. The printing of e-reserve readings at Princeton accounts for a large portion of printing in public clusters (total of 10 million sheets of…
Princeton University has created a cyberinfrastructure, says Curt Hillegas, the Director of Princeton’s TIGRESS High Performance Computing and Visualization Center, itself a collaboration between the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE). Developed within the past decade, this cyberinfrastructure consists of computational systems, data and information management, advanced instruments, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and advanced networks to improve scholarly productivity and enable knowledge breakthroughs and discoveries not otherwise possible. At the April 8 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Hillegas noted that the University’s research computing activity has grown to keep pace with and to…
The Technology Manager for the History Department at Princeton University, Carla Zimowsk has provided technical support for the department for 10 years. Not trained as a historian or a GIS expert, she draws upon graduate work in organizational communications and knowledge management. As a result, during the past decade, she has come to understand the needs of those she supports. "The faculty all have stuff," she began at the March 24 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, "and it tells a story when pulled together." In a trip to the Visualization Centre at the University of Birmingham several years ago, she suddenly…
Imagine harnessing the power of the sun within a magnetic bottle. Unlike hydrogen bombs, which are essentially uncontrolled fusion reactions, scientists for decades have been pursuing the peaceful challenge of safely harnessing fusion energy, a potentially efficient and environmentally attractive energy source. Progress in addressing this scientific grand challenge, suggested William Tang, the Director of the Fusion Simulation Program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has benefited substantially from advances in super-computing. At the March 10 Lunch ‘n Learn, Tang noted that such capabilities continue to progress at a remarkable rate, from tera-to-petascale today, and to exascale in the…
Computers use an ingenious invention called public key cryptography to transmit secrets on the internet, even through public channels that can be observed by anyone. The approach is instrumental today to the secure flow of information on the internet and the whole realm of electronic commerce. There are simple programs that can monitor internet traffic, and even the simplest requests will flow through many, and perhaps dozens of computers. Unsecured transactions can be read by any malicious hacker almost as easily as if you had transmitted the information on a postcard. In his March 3 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Dickinson…
“Smartphones are the new platform, and apps are the core,” says Douglas Dixon, an independent technology consultant, author, and speaker specializing in digital media. “In just a year and a half, the Apple App Store for iPhone users has surpassed 140,000 applications, and users have downloaded more than 3 billion apps. — Not bad for a new market that was created only a year and a half earlier.” At the February 24 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Dixon explored the range of apps being developed for these new platforms. Beyond rude sound effects and popping bubbles, developers are leveraging both the…
