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A colossus of computing

By Mara Fink '11
November 19, 2008

Students at St. Olaf have created a computer program that can condense work that would normally take 37 hours into just one hour, while still allowing other students to check their e-mail on that same computer.

MistRider
This chart shows how MistRider enables students to continue using computers at the same time the program is using them to process large amounts of data.
The new MistRider system, which consists of 37 computers, is located in two classrooms in the link between Regents Hall and Old Music Hall. It is a Beowulf cluster, or a computer system that processes large amounts of data. Clusters such as MistRider perform computations with huge amounts of data using a map-reduce mechanism, similar to the way that Google and Yahoo sort enormous amounts of information when they process Internet searches.

Because there are 37 machines working on the same problem, they can break up the work between each computer, resulting in a huge amount of data processed in a very reasonable amount of time. "MistRider gives us a large tool for doing things that were out of the question before, and it gives St. Olaf students the opportunity to do research that university researchers may not have thought of," says Associate Professor of Computer Science Dick Brown.

Claim to Fame
Each MistRider machine has two operating systems, which means it's essentially two computers in one. This allows students to use the computers as they would in a computer lab anywhere on campus, while at the same time the cluster is processing vast amounts of data.

It is the dual nature of these computers that make the MistRider stand out from other Beowulf clusters in colleges and universities across the nation. Brown says that although some major research universities use Beowulf clusters, they are usually used for a particular project and can't be used more broadly. However, the machines in MistRider can also function as a normal desktop computer. Furthermore, when they do want to do a computation, most schools would essentially have to shut down the entire computer lab, while the computer lab using MistRider will still be accessible to students even while the program is computing large amounts of data.

By students, for students
Students worked with Information and Instructional Technologies to create the MistRider system, with the goal of creating a program that could be used by both a typical student checking their e-mail and another student processing data.

Todd Frederick '09, one of the students involved in the construction of the program, says the increased amount of data people gather is giving rise to the importance of programs like MistRider. "The data people produce is growing every day without any sign of slowing down, and so handling all this information is a very important problem in computing," he says.

Brown also notes that MistRider is useful for many kinds of computing, from computer science classes to data from political polls, which makes it more accessible for all different kinds of students and faculty members. Students are working to create programming for diverse groups ranging from upper-level environmental studies courses to introductory computer science classes.

Contact Kari VanDerVeen at 507-786-3970 or vanderve@stolaf.edu.