Engineers win for making cool stuff

According to BCNET—a non-profit society for the development of advanced networks in B.C.—UVic engineering graduate students make the coolest stuff.

UVic computer science student Brian Corrie and electrical and computer engineering student Daniel Vanderster won two of four categories in this year's BCNET Coolest Applications Contest, which was held at the fourth annual Advanced Networks Conference in Vancouver this spring.

Corrie won a $2,000 award for the most innovative submission, the Distributed Tabletop Collaboration project, which explores the natural benefits of face-to-face communication (making use of a digital tabletop interaction device) and how this communication is affected when one of more of the collaborators are located at remote sites.

Vanderster won a $2,000 award for the proposal with best broadband potential, the Grid Canada project. In recent years, computational challenges faced by researchers in the natural sciences have quickly outpaced the abilities of resources at Canadian academic institutions. In an effort to solve these challenges, "grid computing" combines the resources of multiple sites and gives researchers access to unprecedented computational power.

Using facilities at UVic, the University of Alberta and the National Research Council, the Grid Canada project seeks to design and implement a national computational grid of more than 200 processors.