Budding engineers take flight at OSU-Tulsa summer camp

Madison Maier is precise with her measurements. She knows a few extra centimeters of foam board could be the difference between a soaring model drone and a pile of broken materials.

“I like measuring and trying different designs to make the best drone,” said Maier, a freshman at Glenpool High School. “It’s pretty cool that you can take regular foam boards and turn them into something that can fly.”

Though she’s only in her first year of high school, Maier is already considering a career in engineering. That interest brought her to Oklahoma State University-Tulsa on Friday to build a model unmanned aerial vehicle, or what’s more commonly known as a drone.

The project was part of the Tulsa Alliance for Engineering’s annual summer camp for middle and high school students. OSU-Tulsa partnered with Wallace Engineering for the event, which gives students like Maier the opportunity to learn more about the different fields of engineering.

The camp included instruction from Dr. James Kidd, OSU clinical associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, on aerospace mechanics and a lesson on how to build a model drone. Students applied the knowledge they gained from Kidd to build their drones.

Maier was placed with a team of eight other students to design, construct and test a model drone using foam board, glue and an electronic motor.

“Each member brought their own ideas about design and construction and they had to come together as a team to find the best solution,” said Ronald Knight, OSU-Tulsa academic coordinator for the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology. “In addition to applying engineering concepts, the activity teaches them important lessons about problem solving and teamwork.”

The project challenged A.J. Pace, a freshman at Broken Arrow High School, because of the number of people on his team.

“I […]

CASE STUDY: Spectra and the Tandy Supercomputer shorten calculation rates from days to minutes, saving time and lives.

America’s First “Community” Supercomputer
TSC’s business model is unique because it creates a community of users, sharing the costs of infrastructure and support, making this resource available to parties who couldn’t otherwise afford it. Located in the Data Center at One Technology Center (Tulsa City Hall), TSC is committed to continuously provide their users with modern high performance technology by regularly updating the supercomputer with state of the art technology. This allows TSC to seamlessly add nodes as its membership base increases.

The Challenge: Affordable, Transparent File Storage
The Oklahoma Innovation Institute launched its community supercomputer project in 2013. TSC currently manages approximately 30 TB of data for its users, primarily scientific data sets for research projects. TSC has a large, high-performance Panasas object storage system and acts as a global storage pool for multi-user access. The IT team decided to house some data on-site at their Tulsa datacenter, and sought a reliable, scalable storage solution to archive information being accessed by multiple users at any given time.

TSC needed to provide an alternative from their primary Panasas NAS for medium-term archive and lower-speed workflows with many metadata operations. The envisioned solution would ease the load on the primary storage to increase the overall performance of demanding research and engineering workflows. TSC wanted to offer transparent file storage access that was invisible to the individual users accessing the data frequently.

Spectra Logic
June 10, 2014
Link to Case Study