The current activities are reasonably well-described in the pages about diagrams and natural language.
The lab infrastructure has recently been improved with the addition of an Apple Xserve (Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors), 12GB of RAM and 1TB RAID 5 drives. Four Mac Minis are attached to form a small cluster. We have experimented with Apache Hadoop, HBase, and XGrid, learning how to develop cluster computing strategies.