BRYN MAWR STUDENTS, FACULTY MEMBERS BUILD SUPERCOMPUTER

Audrey Flattes '06 and Darby Thompson '05

About 40 people — students, faculty and staff members — gathered on Monday night to build Bryn Mawr's first "Beowulf" supercomputer in Room 339 of Park Science Building. The event was organized by Assistant Professors Michael Noel of Physics and Douglas Blank of Computer Science. Working in teams, the group assembled and then linked 24 identical computers to make one giant machine capable of processing information at a speed once achievable only by multimillion-dollar supercomputers.

"We started at 6 p.m.," Blank says. "We stopped around 7 for pizza, which was provided by the Center for Science in Society, and by 9 o'clock we had most of the computers built. By midnight, all of the computers were built and all of the software was installed. Now we just have to do a little tinkering before it's ready to operate as a real cluster computer of the Beowulf class."

The Beowulf project was named by two researchers at a division of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It started about 10 years ago, when people began to realize that a number of small, inexpensive computers working in parallel could achieve the same results as one enormously expensive supercomputer. Beowulf computers have opened up a world of possibilities for all kinds of computing projects, especially in physics," says Noel.

In the Bryn Mawr group, each team assembled its computer from a "motherboard," memory, a CPU (central processing unit), a case to contain it all, and an old computer used for disk drives and spare parts as needed. The College's Information Services Department provided the used parts and almost half of the funding for the project. Other funding was donated by most of the science departments. "We had quite a mix of people," says Blank. "A few computer science majors, but lots of students from all sorts of disciplines, and their friends," he says. "I realized afterward that some of these students had never really handled tools before — let alone sensitive electronics equipment — but we had a 100 percent success rate. All 24 computers worked without a hitch."

Blank is pleased with the student turnout. "I think it's great for the students to build a computer," he says. "Now they have a better understanding of what a computer is and how it works. The technology is less intimidating and mysterious when you can see the person behind the curtain."

Both Blank and Noel already have plans for using the College's new supercomputing capability. Blank plans to use the Beowulf computer to work on code that simulates neural networks and evolution in order to control robots. Noel is ready to crunch some numbers and has plans for simulating complex wave interactions.

"The supercomputer is great for any project that is computationally expensive," says Blank. "It can be used to search genomic data, to simulate weather or geological processes, to do economic modeling or three-dimensional animation." Blank and Noel are open to partners from the Bryn Mawr College community to explore parallel computing.

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