Beowulf Party Offers Pizza, DIY Know-how

Tonight — Thursday, April 13 — the Bryn Mawr Computer Science Program will hold its third annual Beowulf Build-Your-Own-Supercomputer party. Participants, fueled by pizza, will learn how to assemble a computer from scratch; the computers will then be harnessed to run in parallel and added to the already-existing Beowulf cluster, which can produce the same results as an enormously expensive supercomputer. All are invited to the event, which begins at 6 p.m. in Park 339.

Twelve computers will be assembled, says Associate Professor of Computer Science Doug Blank, but each will have two processors and 4 gigabytes of RAM. The current Beowulf cluster comprises 48 computers. After tonight's event, the cluster of 72 processors will be one of the most powerful in the Philadelphia area.

The Beowulf project was named by two researchers at a division of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Blank and Associate Professor of Physics Michael Noel brought the program to Bryn Mawr.

"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.

"Faculty and students use the Beowulf cluster for many tasks, including robots that learn, artificial evolution, rendering 3D images, modeling geological processes, and testing quantum models, among others," Blank says.

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