Students and faculty in the College of Business have created a supercomputer from donated materials in an effort to provide affordable supercomputing power to Muncie.
Started as a student project in Fall 2001 for Fred Kitchens' systems analysis and design class, the supercomputer, officially titled the Cluster Computing Research Project, has computation power in excess of 1983 state-of-the-art technology, Kitchens said.
According to the Cluster Computing Research Project Web site, five students started the project, a Beowulf-class system, running the Linux operating system. Program founders have come to refer to the computer as "Beowulf."
Able to perform 180 million operations per second, Beowulf is designed to perform tasks beyond the ability of conventional personal computers including nuclear, pharmaceutical and chemical research, senior Mark Cheeseman said.
"We encourage anyone who has something to run on this computer to contact us," Kitchens said. "We've been speaking to local civic groups in order to promote the business application potential for this machine."
Currently, the computer consists of 17 working computers compiled from 45 donated PCs, mostly Pentium 100s and 200s from private donors and the university, Kitchens said.
"Right now, we have no plans to network the system with other computers, but that is a possibility if we have the need," Kitchens said.
Beowulf is located in its own room on the second floor of the Whitinger Business Building.
"Our only limitation is power supply," Kitchens said. "If we outgrow the office we're in now, we basically outgrow the power plugs available."
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