A mentioned in the reference material and during the poster information session, powerpoint is the software to use for creating posters. There are useful tips at this site for using Powerpoint to create your poster. This powerpoint link is part of this poster guideline page ; check the ‘software’ tab listed on the right hand side.
Rishi Sharan discovered an extremely helpful matlab function, matlab2tikz(), to make very nice and malleable plots. Attached is a very simple sample plot and the src folder which is all you need. Empty it into the directory where your code is and calling matlab2tikz() just creates a new .tex file with your plot and. There is included code in the readme that will compile the latex for the user. Download sample code here and testplot.tex is here
Link to Mann Library for poster creation.