SMARTER STRATEGIES

Higher Computing Power for Higher Ed

Dennis McCafferty | Date: 05-28-10 | Comments

Purdue has launched the equivalent of a supercomputer for a relative dime � thanks to a solution called DiaGrid.

Like many universities, Purdue needs a great deal of computing tools to conduct research. For instance, these tools have helped render fly-through animation of a proposed satellite city to serve as a refuge for Istanbul, Turkey, in case of an earthquake. They�ve also been used to create Nano Factor, a game designed for middle school-aged students interested in science and engineering.

Innovations like these mean that computing power is always in great demand, even if budgets for servers and other power essentials fall short.

Despite this need, many machines throughout the Purdue campuses have only been in use half of the time. So university officials have collaborated with Wethersfield, Conn.-based Cycle Computing to build DiaGrid, a grid of idle campus computers/servers to provide computing capacity. DiaGrid serves the main Purdue campus, along with Indiana University, Notre Dame, Indiana State, Purdue�s Calumet and North Central campuses, as well as Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.

With a motto of �No Cycle Left Behind,� those working on the project selected the free, open-source distributed computing system, Condor, developed by the University of Wisconsin, and what�s called the CycleServer compute management tool from Cycle Computing. Computers in the pool run client software, and efficiently and securely connect them to front-end servers. Jobs are then submitted to these servers and parceled out to various pool machines when idle. This way, tens of thousands of processors can be brought to tackle problems from various researchers. Using Condor�s flexible policy features, technical staff can control when and how their machines are used, such as "evenings only."

Results are already surpassing expectations: The university has increased total capacity to more than 177 teraflops�equal to a $3 million supercomputer requiring several thousand square feet of data center space. But DiaGrid came at a cost of just $100,000. With approximately 31,000 processors, it currently offers 15.6 million available computation hours, and over the last month, the flagship clusters were 97.3 percent utilized. DiaGrid was recently named by IDG�s InfoWorld as a �top 100 IT project� of the year.

The project allows university researchers to continue to pursue computationally intensive tasks, such as simulating the Oort Cloud to better understand the solar system�s formation, or project the reliability of Indiana�s electricity supply. �DiaGrid is an essential component to our research infrastructure,� says John Campbell, associate vice president for Information Technology at Purdue. �During the past year, it provided over 17 million hours of computation for researchers in a variety disciplines, from agriculture to engineering.�

The project demonstrates that the most expensive servers are those that are already owned and in place, says Jason Stowe, founder/CEO of Cycle Computing. �We�ve worked with companies in multiple industries�including financial services and life sciences�to harvest unused resources, and see this becoming a more popular cost- and energy-saving trend in the future.�