iQua Research Group

We are a small research team interested in exploring our limits as we investigate interesting problems in the area of large-scale distributed systems, peer-to-peer networks, and wireless networks. We are located in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. Our group logo represents (guess what?) a Möbius Strip, and blue is our colour (as in “aqua”).

Contact us if you are eager to chat about research, or life as a Torontonian in general.

We maintain a small library of interesting books in the group, so that every team member may benefit from reading them (and not having to wait for returns or return for reserves in the libraries around campus). Take a quick tour in our list of books.

Since we live in the lab (well, not precisely) and breathe paper deadlines, we are proud of our laboratory environment. Our little corner in the Bahen Centre of Information Technology (Bahen 4176) hosts ten cubicle spaces for the team, complete with a fridge, a bookshelf, a projector screen, and — most importantly — two leather sofas.

As fans of computer engineering, we love our computers. In our lab, we have one eight-core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz Mac Pro with NVidia 8800GT GPU, twelve iMac desktop computers (five G5s, four Intel Core Duos, and three Intel Core 2 Duos), three Macbook laptops, and one Thinkpad. Since we have big plans for experiments, we run them on servers. Our servers (in dedicated server rooms, of course) include a high-performance computing cluster (with two racks, three switches, a KVM console, 54 dual-CPU servers, and 20 quad-CPU servers), and a Dell PowerEdge 2500 — in service since May 2001 and serving this web site. Our primary group server is hosted on a Power Mac G5 Quad with 4GB memory, 2.5 TB storage, and four PowerPC G5 processors. It is used as our internal web server, open directory server, mail server, calendar server, as well as file server. It currently runs Mac OS X Leopard Server. In our internal web site, we take full advantage of the latest Wiki and blog technologies using Web 2.0, with extensive tagging, calendaring, and search abilities.

Combined, our computing facilities allow us to try things to our heart’s content, without worrying about the lack of resources. As you can see, we are a Mac-centric group when it comes to day-to-day computing, but we strive to develop cross-platform code that runs equally well on Linux, Windows, and of course, the Mac.