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M. S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore.

MSRIT is one of the premier engineering institutes in India. The following is a compilation of a few of the interesting things that come to mind about my term at MSRIT.

Fizz Cluster

Fizz started off early in the semester, when Srichand and I were deciding what we could work on as our final project. The setup was really simple and required us to only LAN-boot the nodes which would import the OS image from the main node. The nodes, besides the main node, are called compute nodes. The name Fizz was a result of something that should not be shared publicly for our safety.
Anyways, what we observed was rather interesting. For example. we shut a compute node in the middle of the task and saw how the rest of the nodes handeled the load. After this we hope to use the main lab (this test was done in the Data Mining Lab) with over 50 nodes! This cluster is called, Big Fizz.

ACM ICPC 2005

In our second year at MSRIT, Nikhil, Srichand and I participated in the event. We qualified for the regional finals which was held at Jadavapur University along with IITK. We shamelessly called ourselves Beta-NSA, since it was the first time we were taking part. The experience was really good and besides, checking out a new city is always fun. Click on the picture to point your browser to the site where online problems (and other related info) are available for the contest. I highly recommend this to any undergrad student.

Mukthi/Vrlinug

Mukthi is series of technical events driven by the FOSS movement. It was one of the biggest student driven FOSS events in India with over 500 attendees for each of its editions. The events include technical talks, some really cool demos (the PS3's first public appearance in India), quizes among other things. Mukthi is organized by the Linux (GNU/Linux if you're that type) user group at MSRIT called, VrLinug. Three editions of Mutkhi are behind us as of now.

JAWTScore - Desktop Cricket Scoreboard


JAWTScore is a simple desktop app written in Java. I was learning more about AWT in Java and thought this would be a good way to practice and possibly learn some new things. Initially I had something else in mind. I thought I could take XML feeds from say around 5 websites and use that as an online desktop app. With this users could receive new alerts from Slashdot, CricInfo, CNN etc. This required knowing how to parse and format XML documents. I'm not to familiar with it (not yet!) and thus JAWTScore. JAWTScore 1.0 will be available for download once I'm done with the final touches.

GetMeNews!


GetMeNews! is a simple application written in Java (Swing) which feches the latest news from Slashdot, CNN and CricInfo. The application uses a perl backend which parses the RSS feed and prepares the HTML ready for the application front end. The screenshot above is of GetMeNews! in it's initial stages. The application will be available for download soon.

Xen install guide

Xen is a open source VMM. With Xen one can run multiple guest virtual operating systems off a base xen kernel. The base system can be a modified Linux or FreeBSD kernel. Xen concentrates more on performance than on elegance. Xen also supports dynamic migration of the guests which makes it suitable for distributed systems. I have prepared a small install guide which could be helpful to anyone who wants to experiment with Xen. The guide is available here. Any feedback is welcome.