Charlie Peck, Ph.D.

About me

My favorite activities include volunteer firefighting and EMS, gardening, cooking and traveling.

My personal hobbies include:

• https://cluster.earlham.edu/
• LittleFe.net
• http://bccd.net

Education

• Ph.D., Union Institute & University
• B.A., Earlham College

Professional memberships

• ACM (SIGCSE)
• IEEE (CS)  
• SuperComputing (SC) Conference – Education and Outreach 
• XSEDE

Research projects

Collaborative student research experiences

In the Summer of 2017, I led a research group of nine students and three faculty members from Earlham that gathered on the ashy black gravel at the base of Sólheimajökull, a glacial finger that extends 15 kilometers from Mýrdalsjökull, an ice cap in southern Iceland. We were eager to start our climb but first had to learn to walk.

In the Spring of 2012, Ivan Babic (EC ‘13), Kristin Muterspaw (EC ‘15), Elena Sergienko (EC ‘14), Tristan Wright (EC ‘13) and I agreed to support a group of geology and chemistry faculty and students as they worked in the field collecting geocoded environmental parameters and soil, water and gas samples. Over the course of the next 14 months, we designed, built, and deployed a series of open/commodity geocoded sensor platforms for atmospheric, soil, water and gas parameters. This culminated in July of 2013 with a month of field testing working with the geologists, chemists and their students in Iceland as they explored lava tubes, continental rifts, glaciers and (dormant) volcanoes. Alongside this, we examined environmental microbial communities, sampling soil and water in a variety of locations across Iceland and extracting the microbial DNA for analysis. Quite serendipitously we were presented with the opportunity to take samples at a small archeological dig at Skalanes, a small research station on an Eastern peninsula. These samples will be analyzed with an eye towards learning which animals early Icelandic people domesticated.  http://eciceland2013.wordpress.com

Off-campus study experiences

I recently taught Science, Technology and Society while leading Earlham’s England program.  We were living in London, which provides an incredibly rich environment for place-based learning of this material. Our lab on latitude and longitude was done in Greenwich, the evolution unit included looking at the fossils Darwin collected on the Beagle’s journey (now housed at the Natural History Museum), and our venture into computing included a lab at Bletchley Park. One of the “hidden” science treasures we took advantage of were talks at the Royal Society, the Geological Society, the Linnean Society and the Dana Centre.  http://ecengland2011.wordpress.com

Scholarly interest

• Parallel and distributed computing
• Computational science
• Bioinformatics
• Visualization of scientific data
• Expeditionary science
• Hardware/software systems
• Technology for disaster preparation and response
• Technology for sustainable energy production and conservation

Published works

co-PI of the LittleFe project, an inexpensive educational appliance for parallel and distributed computing, LittleFe.net 

co-PI of the Bootable Cluster CD (BCCD) project, http://BCCD.net

co-PI of the Cluster Computing Group, http://cluster.earlham.edu