Senior Earns Second Place at Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Conference

April 17, 2014

Bradford Bazemore, senior computer science major in the College of Engineering and Information Technology from Lawrenceville, Ga., has earned second place in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Southeast Conference 2014 Student Paper Competition. His paper titled, "Low Power Cluster Development System," explored developing a cluster computer, a type of super computer. “I wanted to create a super computer that was small, portable and used very little energy to run,” said Bazemore. Funded through a student research grant from the College of Engineering and Information Technology, he explained the motivation behind his research by acknowledging a gap in size and function. “Super computers have an inherent advantage over normal computers but the only ones available are the size of a refrigerator and they consume lots of power,” he said. “In the tradeoff, I didn’t sacrifice the speed of the system for power.” Bazemore hopes his development system with its low power usage and low cost can expose high school and college students to super computers before they have careers in fields such as engineering, aerospace, computer science, physics and economics. Bazemore’s prize was $500 and bragging rights. “I was proud to represent Georgia Southern University in the competition. My hope is that me winning second place will encourage other students to pursue research in more fields. It also was great knowing that out of all the schools in the Southeast, including Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech, Georgia Southern came in second.” This was Bazemore’s second time to compete in the IEEE paper competition. In 2013, he won first place in the technical category. IEEE is the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology. Bazemore is a member of the IEEE and the Association of Computing Machinery.