Pulse Programmer

This is a little late, but the sunshine only started in Seattle a few weeks ago, so I forgot that it was summer :]

Farewell to David Nufer, Rob McClure, and Jeff Booth who are gone at internships. We look forward to seeing you again in the fall, and I hope to have exciting progress to report then. Also, congratulation to John Williams for graduating, and to Aaron Avril for deferring admission to graduate school.

To fill the hole left in the my heart, we have three new students working on the pulse programmer this summer. Everyone please give it up for:

Harshad Petwe, a rising sophomore who is a CSE major hopeful. He will be working on automated testing and putting a yellow box online by the end of this summer (we have to beat the Soviets).

Our next two undergrads hail all the way from Boris's ion trap lab.
Bing Chen (electrical engineering) and Kate Mitchell (physics and computer science) will be helping me get state detection and PMT counting to work with the yellow box, in addition to its frequency scanning prowess.

In the last few weeks, there have been two new posters about the pulse programmer here at the University of Washington.

I made a poster to recruit new undergrads to the project for this summer and the fall, with the grandiose title "Quantum Computer Engineering", mostly about ion traps and pulse programming.

http://pulse-programmer.org/posters/acm-poster-2010.png

Also, our computer science undergrads, David, Rob, and Jeff, created a poster for the annual undergrad research symposium, describing their separate sub-projects over the past three quarters:

http://pulse-programmer.org/posters/uw-urs-2010.png

These posters are now decorating our underground lab so that people passing by will know what we are working on.

Philipp and I would like to recognize Boerge's hard work with the sequencer2 Python software, the Innsbruck DDS board, and his docs for dummies manual.

Today, he is now a full project admin on SourceForge and an owner of the Google Group. Thanks again, Boerge!

I applied to be a mentoring organization for GSoC this summer on behalf of pulse programming. For those of you who don't know, every summer Google matches up students and projects and pays a stipend to produce more quality open source code for the greater public good.

You can find more information about the program here:

http://socghop.appspot.com/

Here is the full text of my application:

http://pulse-programmer.org/gsoc/orgapp.html

And here is a page listing some project ideas, for prospective students to consider when they are applying:

http://pulse-programmer.org/index.php?page=gsoc-ideas

I will send updates on whether we get accepted. If you are a full-time university student anywhere in the world, feel free to apply to GSoC starting on March 29 but before April 9, 2010. You don't have to work on the pulse programmer, although obviously I would be happy if you did :]

With luck, we will introduce more students to the field of quantum computer engineering.

Dear All,

I'm Hong, a graduate student working with Hartmut at UC Berkeley. I just uploaded the FPGA PID control (to be used for laser lock box, for example) on to the project page. A brief description of what it does is included in the folder though I will keep adding more information onto it.

Please let me know if you have any comment!

Hong