For a few weeks in October 2003, hundreds of Virginia Tech students congregated not for a protest, but to create "Big Mac," a supercomputer made of 1,100 Apple G5s. The group of computers, known as a Beowulf cluster, was ranked among the fastest supercmputers in the world. On campus, the University operates several of these clusters, but on a smaller scale.
A Beowulf cluster is "a bunch of commodity computers put together with open source software to create a supercomputer," said Curt Hillegas, OIT's research and academic applications support manager.
He explained that the Beowulf clusters on campus are used by a wide range of departments, including electrical engineering, the Wilson School, mathematics and astrophysics.
"The clusters are often coded to model scientific or engineering phenomena," Hillegas said. "Weather modeling has been used by the Woodrow Wilson School to model transport of pollution contaminants to see how stuff propagates across the country."
Most of the clusters are used for graduate work, but Hillegas estimated that 10 percent of Beowulf use is performed by undergraduates working on their theses. The most common work done by undergraduates is modeling biological phenomena.
Beowulf clusters are named after the classic novel from medieval times.
"The analogy is that the computer problems people are trying to solve are Grendel," Hillegas said. "It was a good image for the people at the time, I guess."
The concept of clusters has been around for at least 20 years, but the first computer clusters at the University were owned by the geophysical sciences department.
Acquired in the late 1990s, these clusters were called Geowulf, Hillegas said. Now there are several of them scattered around campus.
Beowulf clusters are efficient because they are cheaper than an individual supercomputer, Hillegas said. "There are limitations on single images and on scalability. As computers get bigger and you double the processors, you don't necessarily double performance," he said.
The clusters are used extensively for research by the government, industries and labs and consistently garner high rankings on the top 500 supercomputer sites listed on www.top500.org.
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