The development of a Tri-Use cluster for general computer education, high performance computing education, and computationally intensive research

  • Authors:

  • Andrew J. Pounds;Rajeev Nalluri;Bennie L. Coleman

  • Affiliations:

  • Mercer University, Macon, GA;Mercer University, Macon, GA;Mercer University, Macon, GA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 43rd annual Southeast regional conference - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper describes the construction of a tri-use computer cluster for general computer science education, instruction in parallel high performance computing, and computationally intensive scientific research. While many schools today are starting to include parallel computing in their curriculum, a large number of smaller institutions lack the resources to devote a significant amount of their equipment budget exclusively to computers for parallel computing. Similarly, many schools would like to have computational facilities for scientific research, but cannot afford to designate machines solely for this purpose. Our system allows for one set of systems to be easily shared between pedagogical and research tasks. The system described herein utilizes standard hardware components and a combination of open-source Linux and commercial software. In addition, the development of a software program to selectively boot between operating systems is described.