Distributed Computing for High-Performance Computing at Montgomery College

The time is now, even in a time of scarcity!

High-Performance Computing in a Community College: is it possible? With a curriculum already developed at Contra Costa College, 10 miles from the University of California, Berkeley, the answer is yes. But it is very tricky and not easy High-Performance Computing in High Schools? another report. The Contra Costa College High Performance Computing site. Another sobering view on "New Directions for Computational Science Education. " I am sure their are others. Lowest denominator and vocational tech programs do not work in a field that is rapidly changing!

Computer clustering is explained in a Wikipedia article, with links to Grid Computing, the next abstraction up. Clustering is vendor neutral:

Microsoft Cluster Servers Wikipedia article explaining Microsoft software with links to Microsoft.

Apple Cluster Servers Wikipedia article Xgrid with links to Apple.
BOINC explanation of Grid computing versus just volunteer computing for others in a noble cause. Be your own noble cause and educate students at Montgomery College as well as advance the frontiers of scientific and business computing.

Create a Virtual Campus SuperComputing Center (VSCS) Boinc, which is at Berkley; software is free. Computer security seems to be as absolute as possible. Expanding in a time of scarcity, this is the way to do it, use what we already have in computers all over the college. We can form a real learning community and learn collaboratively together. This will automatically involve students in cutting edge research that will look good on their resumes and help them get jobs and transfer to other institutions. This is one of our core goal as a community college!
The Lattice Project at the University of Maryland at College Park Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology is doing it using Boinc. They are using other peoples computers; we ought to start by using Montgomery College's lab computers that are mostly idle most of the time.
High Performance Computer Lab at George Washington University

Some faculty who are interested in High-Performance Computing coming to MC:

Dr. Nawal Benmouna, physics faculty, at Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus would like to do this and involve our students to do nuclear physics detector simulations in cooperation with the Jefferson Labs, George Washington University, and Catholic University of America.
There are many other faculty members, too; I just have not spoken to them yet.
Faculty, if you would like your name and reason for involving students at MC in "High-Performance Computing" please send me something like the entry under Nawal Benmouna via e-mail, and you will be included, too.
Why do Dr. Max Nam and Dr. Harold Williams, physics faculty and staff at the Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus, want High Performance computing at Montgomery College? Cosmologists and astronomers may not see clearer than others, but we certainly see farther. (Poul Pedersen, a college IT employee, and Harold Williams wrote the original NSF proposal that funded the project that connected Montgomery College to the Internet.) High-Performance Computing can probably be done initially for almost no money at all, just using free software and the considerable investment that we already have in computers and Internet connectivity throughout the three campuses. We do not have to wait for Internet 2 and the NOC, Network Operations Center, to be located at the Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus.
This will require the students and faculty users to learn how to program using Boinc in this novel environment.
Mathematics and the Natural Sciences (Biology and the Physical Science departments) need to assist Information Systems (Computer Science), our colleague, with interdisciplinary computational problems, which can be solved with our Virtual Supercomputer Center, VSC, formed from computers on all of the campuses via Network computing.

296 computers in "Computer Labs" on the Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus have Internet connectivity that could clearly be use in this distributive computing endeavor, and the number of available computers may be much higher (296 or above). The Rockville and Germantown Campus also have large numbers of computers suitable for distributed computing. As soon as a student touched the mouse or was running any program on one of the cluster computers, the computer would immediately be dropped from the cluster and grid until such time as the computer was no longer being used. This will not keep Art students from using MacIntosh computers for Art, or any other student from using a Windows computers for anything they wish to do in the "Computer Lab." Cluster software only uses spare cycles, which is the majority of the computer cycles. I have been running Boinc software on the college's computers in my office and the planetarium for many years now. As soon as I touch the mouse it goes away instantly, as far as I can tell, and does not come back until I am doing nothing for ten minutes.
I started this conversation with Ahadu S. Tilahun, computer engineering student and student senate president elect for fall 2007 and spring 2008 at the Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus on Friday, May 11, 2007; you may contact him at e-mail. On Saturday, February 23, 2008 the first Student Excellence Expo was held at the Takoma Park/silver Spring campus, and Ahadu S. Tilahun presented High Performance Computing in MC (A Microsoft PowerPoint, a pptm file) and also produced a hand out in Microsoft Publisher. If you wish to support or ask questions about Cluster and or Grid Computing coming to Montgomery College and being used for "High-Performance Computing" with our students and faculty, please send me e-mail. I think the time is now for "High-Performance Computing" to come to our campuses and to be used by our students and faculty for our research problems that need "High-Performance Computing."
The computer lab in ST304 which has a group of Macintosh and a group of Microsoft computers should be the first room connected and used in distributed computing. Pictures of the computer in ST304 may be found at this sight. This is one of the times on May 18, 2008, when all of the computers in the entire room are doing nothing. Even when students are using the room some computers are generally unused. After distributed computing works in ST304 it should be expanded to all of the computer in class rooms on the third floor in the ST, Charlene Nunley Student Services building. After this is working then all the computers in class rooms and labs on the Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus. Then to the other campuses, Rockville and Germantown, and then the campusettes like Gaithersburg Center and the Wheaton Center. After all of the computer labs and computer classroom are connected on all the campuses then the individual computers in offices could also be connected. This also offers and opportunity to do computer inventory and management all of the time by looking at the log files on the BOINC server. Providing all of this is successful at all stages then eventually we could offer the opportunity for people to connect their computers at home to the network. This latter stage though requires a different way of ruining BOINC since they are on the other side of the college firewall and security is a much bigger problem. In fact, this latter stage may never be done as it may be unnecessary to get that much computing power for anything any of us at the want to do in computing at Montgomery College. It is a way to involve the alumnus and their computers, though. This latter is called volunteer computing and is more loosely coupled and requires redundancy in work unit calculations because of trust and security issues.
As soon as ST304 has BOINC installed and a successful program compiled for the Macintosh machines and the Microsoft machines in that room retuning useful results to the server then interested faculty would have to be taught how to program this massively parallel beast that has parallelism at many levels with some unpredictability of how many processors are on the system at any time. Dr. Williams volunteers to teach faculty his own experience on the machine, but I have to have something to experience/experiment on. I have a Microsoft computer and a MacIntosh computer in my office so I could compile the two versions there. One machine somewhere can be picked as the server, eventually to reside in the NOC. We can form a Learning Community of faculty and students to learn how to program this machine. I will help. It will not be easy, but then nothing worth doing is easy or it would already have been done. A committee of computing scientist and computer scientist that are academics should manage this distributed computing. IT is the academy's servant, and we all are the students and the communities servant. This will allow us to better serve our community and world, since the results of the calculations will produce new knowledge in the sciences through computing.

Montgomery College's Planetarium home page.

somewhat mature at 9:14A.M. June 14, 2007
web page by Dr. Harold Williams, last modified 11:54P.M. July 7, 2008.