Angus Macdonald

I created this poster for display in the school’s annual poster session. It is a good summary of the current focus of my research as of December 2008. To summarise, it details a plan to build a database running over lab machines, and gives a few reasons why this is interesting.

Update: I won the best overall poster award at the poster session (the prize, a 16Gb memory stick)!

DBHarvester Poster

You can download the poster here.

You can view a Silverlight Deep Zoom version of the poster here.

Full poster abstract:
The School of Computer Science runs hundreds of computers. The University runs thousands. For large periods of time in each day these computers go unused, wasting processing cycles whilst expensive servers perform tasks such as data warehousing and storage. This project aims to harvest – to identify and use – these in-house resources for use in a distributed database system. The challenges of creating such a system and a proposed solution are discussed in this poster.

As part of our first year as PhD students in St Andrews we have to create a poster for presentation within the school. This poster, formed based on what I’d been reading at the time, discusses the problems of search in distributed systems – why it is difficult, and the various methods for overcoming it.

Search over P2P Poster

You can get a PDF copy of the poster here. I won a best poster for this prize in a school poster session.

My Senior Honours project involved the creation of a web-based tool for Web Service composition. It is the first such tool of its kind.

While great progress has been made in enterprise level process modelling there are currently few tools to help developers wanting to make use of simpler, public Web Services. Consequently there is a scarcity of truly useful SOAP based Web Services on the internet. Enter, YaWSA (Yet another Web Service Acronym)!

You can invoke any Web Service from the website, or choose to link the result of one invocation as a parameter to another.

In October 2007 I won third place at the Scottish Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards for my work on YaWSA.