Green in the Papers

Rowan Computer Patch Creates Power with Scrap
Gloucester County Times Friday, March 23, 2007

It closely resembles something out of a science fiction movie, but its purpose has little to do with world domination or mind control.

Built by a team of Rowan University students using 11 recycled computers and some scrap metal over a two-month period, the machine is actually a powerful computing interface for complex virtual reality programming and modeling.

"A huge amount of processing power is needed to generate complex 3-D models," said Shreekanth Mandayam, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who oversaw the project.

Since the computers used would otherwise have been recycled, the machine was put together on a shoestring budget. The $100 reclining chair was the high-ticket price item and the scrap metal was purchased for another $100.

"Anybody can put 10 computers on a rack somewhere, but it doesn't have the same effect," said Pat Giordano, 24, a graduate student from Gibbstown.

Giordano worked with two other students and fellow 2001 Paulsboro High School graduate Phil Mease, a technician in the lab, on the project.

The interdisciplinary engineering project blending mixed art engineering and computer science was part of the required College of Engineering clinic where students gain hands-on experience working with real-world applications for engineering.

Sitting in a Rowan Hall lab alongside millions of dollars of grant-funded equipment for research, the device known formally as the Integrated Awareness Computing Cluster (IACC) is hard to miss.

One application for the device is for research the college is doing at NASA's Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi. The processing power of the device speeds up the rendering of graphics that can sometimes take as long as a day to complete for virtual reality models of the engine of a spacecraft.

"Through these virtual reality models, we can understand the current health of a system and predict the health of the system over time and in different circumstances," Mandayam said.

"What the students did was come up with a way of putting all of that processing power together in a clever and artistic way," said Mandayam, a Pitman resident. "It's a blend of form and function."

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