New MistRider Beowulf Cluster
The new MistRider Beowulf cluster has been created!
This is a cause for celebration, once you know what this means. Here's some explanation: A Beowulf cluster is a system of multiple computers that are networked together, for the purpose of high-performance computing. St. Olaf's CS program has been constructing and using Beowulf clusters for nearly three years, starting with a student project in CS 350 in Interim, 2006. We have been using our clusters for many projects, involving Physics, Environmental Science, Mathematics, Neuroscience, CS, and other fields. For example, we were able to speed up a radar analysis computation for the CEGSIC Antarctic team, reducing the running time of one computation from four hours to four minutes, and making it possible for the team to process more data more simply in the future.
Up to now, we have had two Beowulf clusters on campus:
Castaway, the first cluster, consists of dozens of discarded computers from the computer center IIT. Castaway's purpose is for training and experimentation with clusters.
Helios, is built from sixteen high-performance Sun servers with funds from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Helios is intended to support high-performance computations in undergraduate research, including projects in other disciplines.
Our first two clusters have been designed, constructed, operated, and
managed entirely by CS students under the direction of
Dick Brown (rab@stolaf.edu). IIT personnel have
always helped with occasional parts and advice, but they haven't
worked directly with the clusters---until now!
The new cluster, named MistRider, began operations on Friday, October 24, as a result of an extraordinary collaboration between IIT staff and the CS faculty and students of the Beowulf team. Instead of devoting computers to the cluster exclusively---which is the norm for clusters---the computers used by MistRider are the same computers in the "Link" rooms RNS 202-203 that CS students use for classes and labs, and each computer can serve both purposes simultaneously! The mission of MistRider is to provide Beowulf cluster computing to courses, in CS and other disciplines, maybe even at other colleges.
MistRider will enable Beowulf computing in courses in CS, Chemistry, Environmental Science, and more. For example, two of our first goals are (1) to make it possible for students in our introductory course CS 121 to do some of the same kinds of computations that Google and Yahoo! use to create their super-fast search engines, and (2) to create a tool for ES 350 students to explore properties of riparian plants that require Beowulf cluster computations.
Here are some CS courses that plan to use MistRider in the next year or two.
In particular, MistRider will appear in upcoming Interim and Spring courses CS 121 (Principles of Computer Science), CS 263 (Ethical Issues in Software Design, where we plan an ethical analysis of this type of computing), and CS 300 (Parallel Computing Systems).
For more information on the MistRider cluster or how you
might use it,
contact Dick Brown (rab@stolaf.edu, 507-786-3860)