We would like to greatly expand the functionality available through the remote interface such as:

• full multi-user support (i.e. user logins with functionality to add users, remove users, monitor users, view user history etc.)
• presentation of detailed information on:
  • every running computation
  • every donor machine (amount of processing performed, number of units processed, uptime/downtime, etc.)
  • overall status of the distributed system, number of donor machines, estimate of system performance (e.g. speed in pentium years), etc.) possibly via a graphical representation
  • information of the set of donor machines (operating systems, locations, etc.)
    It should be noted that all of this information can be easily extracted from the existing system log files
• improve usability and user friendliness of remote interface
• addition of a help index for inexperienced users
• addition of secure communications with the server

This is not an extensive list and the student can make their own suggestions for improvements/enhancements to the remote interface. The student will be given our existing code for the remote interface (doesn't have to be used) and the main task of this project will be to implement as many of these features as is possible. The student will be expected to produce a fully working program by the end of this project. The student will be co-supervised by Ph.D. student Thomas Keane. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at .

The main tasks of this project are to examine the Linpack library and determine the feasibility of running this measurement on our distributed computing system. Using our programming interface (see the developer manual), the student will be expected to produce a distributed program that will execute the Linpack program (or equivalent code) on our distributed computing system to determine the performance of our system. The student will be co-supervised by Ph.D. student Thomas Keane. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at .

However, DCPal is still in the early stages of development and we have identified a number of areas in which the program that could be expanded:

• support for all of the popular bioinformatics database formats (Genbank, EMBL, etc.)
• addition of other alignment algorithms (Needleman-Wunsch, Blast, Fasta, etc.)
• support for all the common alignment output formats (e.g. Blast format results)

A query builder where a researcher can easily perform complex searches is required. Also a dynamically generated graph where every node is an author and every edge is a collaboration with another author will allow researchers to view patterns of collaboration; identifying the most important authors in their field.

You can avail of guest access to the first version of the tool. The student will be co-supervised by Ph.D. student Andrew Page. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at .

SETI@home is a similar distributed system and over 3 million people around the world have donated their machines free clock cycles to the project. The main difference between this system and ours is that it is special-purpose and ours can be programmed to perform any task.

We wish to adapt our system to allow it to be run on top of a Grid such as Condor or Globus. This would allow us to access massive computing resources on existing Grids. The student will be co-supervised by Ph.D. student Andrew Page. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at .

A digital holograpic 'camera' has already been built and we have a small database of 3D frames and video clips. The next step is to look at networking issues. We have experimented with coding and compression of digital holograms and want to extend this to video. One or two creative, imaginative, and highly-competent students are required to join our group in the development of the first MPEG-style codec (compressor-decompressor) for digital holographic video. It is hoped that by the end of the project, Internet transmission of holographic video could be demonstrated. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at .

Such a web-based automated teaching tool was built in a previous year by Des Traynor (currently a PhD student). It consists of (i) a subject-independent teaching architecture, (ii) a completely separate "web of knowledge" of computer theory questions, solutions, and provision for short tutorials, and (iii) a system for recording students grades. This teaching tool will be employed during computer theory lab sessions starting November 2004. A student is required to become familiar with the system, operate it in a lab environment for six weeks, and make any improvements as required. Full documentation will be provided. For the remainder of the project, the student will analyse the effectiveness of the system and design improvements. For example, the set of questions could be increased in size by designing a random choice generator. At the student's discretion, this project could also allow scope for an investigation into the relationship between the limits of artificial intelligence and the limits of automated teaching. If you have any questions, or would like to meet and talk about the project, please feel free to contact me at .