Slashdot Mirror
Project Appleseed Updated
J. FoxGlov writes "UCLA's Project Appleseed has been updated with new benchmarks showing their clusters of Macintosh G3s and G4s running neck and neck with Crays and kicking the snot out of Pentium II clusters, generating fractal clusters in parallel. Includes the recipe for making your own Apple-flavored Beowulf cluster. "
And you can buy a K7 and overclock it to 1Ghz... what's your point?
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
There is absolutely no need to get personal here, but it seems like Apple is a company which has historically aimed its' products at the customers who like userfirendly interfaces, windows, buttons, mice, etc.
True, true. That's almost everyone, though.
They have not been known for their great performance.
Um... not quite. Ever since the PPC was invented, it's always been faster than whatever Intel-based chip was on the market at the time, assuming identical clockrate. The exception was the 601, because you couldn't get equal clockrates; the minimum speed for the 601 was 60 MHz; 486's never went that fast the the Pentium didn't come out for a few months after the 601 did. With the old 68K-based Macs, you have something (though again, the first Macs were faster than the first Intel-based machines, though Intel would catch up and then take the lead once the PC market began to explode).
Their latest product is the iMac.
Huh? Three years ago, their latest product was the iMac. They've only completely revamped their product line since then. And they've introduced products since the latest iMac revisions too (Revision D).
Why then go and attempt to build a high-performance machine?
Why not? Apple's got what it takes to do it. Besides which, people like high performance, especially gamers, and Apple's kind of trying to cater to the gamer market now. Note that I said kind of; Apple seems to have a love/hate relationship with gamers. It's well-known that back in the earliest years, Steve Jobs discouraged games for the Mac, because he didn't want it to be seen as a toy. If you ask me, he's still afraid of that, but he's starting to recognize that games are important for a platform's health. I just wish he'd be a bit more enthusiastic about it; as it is it's rather clear that the Apple talks about gaming only grudgingly. It would still rather not have games on the Mac platform but it sees them as a "necessary evil."
And yes, I do think that little hangup of Apple's is completely and totally insane.
Processing the burnt, charred remains of obnoxious anonymous cowards and trolls such as yourself. Take your Mac-bashing elsewhere.
Giving up, indeed. Have you checked Apple's stock price lately?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
---
Their latest product is the iMac.
---
Since when is their latest product the iMac? I think you need to keep up on the press releases.
---
Why then go and attempt to build a high-performance machine?
---
Why not? There are a lot of things posted to Slashdot that don't make for the most sensible possibilities. Remember, there are people that come here to learn about lego guns and spend time cooling their systems in beer for the humor value.
That said, an easy to use system of this kind might be of interest. Losing a few percentage points in the speed department (which I agree with you, is likely with the current MacOS) could very well be made up for by the ease of administration and setup. That is, if you want to move this kind of technology out of universities and into the Real World.
---
No flamewar, please.
---
None intended.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Don't procede to tell me if Slashdot is my cup of tea. You could multiple my user ID (5387) 12 times and still be under yours (63515), so I think I know a think or two about the people and content here.
How many posts from me have you seen to make these all encompassing statements? Are you basing this on my being a Mac user and a couple of posts, or have you been stalking me for the last few months?
...
First, the Mac has become LESS closed in recent years than it has been in the past (minus the lack of cloning, which I don't care for, but understand the business reasons of). They've opened as much of their OS up as they can without putting themselves out of business, current Macs (with the exception of the consumer line) are fairly expandable, and so on. As for Firewire, given that they spent a lot of cash to develop it, what's the problem there? A quarter isn't exactly a lot to ask, is it?
Second, this is 'News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters' - NOT 'News About Linux, All Other Opinions Worthless'. Are you seriously suggesting that anyone who doesn't tow the Linux-user political line doesn't belong here? That sounds like conformity my friend, the same trait that many Mac and Linux users have traditionally railed against.
Your posting history shows that you're not an idiot, despite those opinions we don't share and a general disdain for computer aesthetics and usability. However, you really should open your mind up a little bit and reconsider your stereotype of Mac users. Quite often, they don't fit. Even worse, they smack of elitism.
[Note: This is coming from someone who can be found booting into BeOS, LinuxPPC, and MacOS 9 on any given day - with OSX being added to the list when the time comes. Try expanding your horizons, life is much better that way]
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
[quote]
You could multiple my user ID (5387) 12 times and still be under yours (63515)
[/quote]
...and yet you could probably spell and multiply better than I. *sigh*
'multiple' = 'multiply'
'12' = '11'
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Makes me wish for cheap PPC boxes. Have any of the cheap IBM reference designs been manufactured yet?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Keep in mind that a Cray can push through massive calculations in a situation non-suitable to parallel processing (i.e. very large linear system solutions) which a beowulf of any type is unsuited for.
On a side note, I found it interesting that this page provided parallel computing APIs for C and Fortran, as well as explaining what can be done with them. Most Beowulf related pages I have seen in the past don't really go into this, leading some people to the incorrect conclusion that any software can be run on a cluster without modification for instant speed boosts. Sorry to burst your bubble, but getting a whole bunch of old 486s together isn't going to instantly give you stellar SETI@Home or Distributed.net scores... :) Kudos to the Appleseed project!
Um... not quite. Ever since the PPC was invented, it's always been faster than whatever Intel-based chip was on the market at the time, assuming identical clockrate. The exception was the 601, because you couldn't get equal clockrates; the minimum speed for the 601 was 60 MHz; 486's never went that fast the the Pentium didn't come out for a few months after the 601 did.
Actually, a couple of points here are not quite right (though your figures are more accurate than the previous figures quoted).
The 486 went up to 100 MHz core clock (3:1 CPU to bus ratio). These were sold as "DX4-100" chips (the "4" is the product of marketing). Actually, IIRC AMD offered a DX4-120 (their best offerings in those days ran on a 40 MHz bus). Time frame almost certainly overlaps heavily with the 601; I would have to do more research to quote date/clock frequency points for either line.
Performace-wise, I've mainly relied on SPEC benchmarks (www.spec.org). These are pretty much the canonical measures of performance for real CPUs (and desktop CPUs as well, which are asymptotically approaching workstation-class). By insisting on the same tests (compiled with the tester's choice of compiler) and on full disclosure of the test systems used, they are as close to vendor-neutral as we're likely to get.
x86 and PPC based machines benchmark at roughly the same speed at any given time in SPEC history. Clock frequencies aren't the same, but that's irrelevant - performance is what matters. While PPC was certainly fast, and definitely has a cleaner architecture than x86, it failed to substantially outperform x86 (and conversely, x86 failed to outperform PPC).
Where things get interesting is the G3 and G4. There has been a suspicious dearth of SPEC information from Apple in recent months/years, and a strong outpouring of questionable benchmarks quoted by their marketing departments (most bizzare was the "1.5 clocks/pixel vs. 200 clocks/pixel" filtering quote, debunked on Slashdot by a few people who provided far faster x86 code). The G3 and G4 are most certainly excellent processors, but Apple has failed to put believable numbers behind them when quoting benchmarks.
What I'd really like to see is an independent testing of SPEC marks. This would be do-able on any of the *NIX variants currently running on Gx, and would be quite straightforward on MacOS X. The problem with independent benchmarking is that Apple is best qualified to produce a compiler for the G3/G4. If a PPC based *NIX group tried it, their numbers would most likely be lower than optimal because the compiler wouldn't optimize as well as it might be able to. It would still be interesting as a data point, though.
Before anyone objects that SIMD instructions (like AltiVec and SSE) are difficult to compile to, I'd like to point out that loop unrolling optimizations take you half way there already.
Summary: In the past, advocates of both architectures have failed to prove that their architecture trounces the other. IMO, current _meaningful_ bickering is hampered by a lack of SPECmarks.
Maybe because 350MHz ist TWO YEARS OLD TECHNOLOGY in the x86 World????
Clock speed will often vary quite widely between architectures; this does not directly affect performance (look at Sparc chips, for example; similar SPEC marks to x86 chips at much lower clock rate).
Performance is based both on clock rate and on how much work is done per clock. This in turn is affected by how pipelining on the chip was set up, and many other things.
A good reference on the subject is "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach", by Hennessy and Patterson (published by Morgan Kaufmann).
Current Macs use IDE, SDRAM, PCI, AGP and several dozen other acronyms.
I've never heard of Macs with AGP ports, and until going back to university I was working for a graphics driver development company. We would have been overjoyed to have AGP Macs to write drivers for.
It costs time and effort to learn what you need to know to build a system, to pick out components, and to actually put the thing together. And when you sum it all up, it's not such a small amount of time and effort. So unless you're in the business of PC hardware support and thus have to possess all this knowledge anyways, then you're getting a *lousy* deal.
It takes me five minutes looking over a parts sheet to decide what I want in an x86 system. I go down to the store, and say "build this for me". I come back a couple of days later, take it home, spend another five minutes attaching cables, and it goes (well, then there's Linux installation, but if I was feeling masochistic I could get Windows pre-loaded).
I used to build my own machines from parts as a hobby. If it's fun, it isn't "cost". I switched to paying for pre-assembly when it became less fun. Cost increase is minimal.
IP may be more flexible but I think AppleTalk/EtherTalk still has an advantage in ease of use. You plug the computers into the LAN and the networking software automagically configures itself. That's nice for small networks.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
An UltraSPARC workstation is by definition NOT a PC. PC stands for personal computer, an inexpensive low power system, any UltraSPARC is automatically not low price or underpowered. As for Macs, the entire Power Mac family is basically PC compatible. The main different between a Compaq PC and a Mac is the difference in the chipset. Current Macs use IDE, SDRAM, PCI, AGP and several dozen other acronyms. It is true that before the Power Mac Apple used NuBus and such proprietary periphrial connections but not anymore and even then its hard drives and CD-ROMs were SCSI. I don't know how much more open Apple could be on its systems. A PCI card will work in both a Mac and PC if you have the appropriate drivers for the device. Its similar to the complain many Linux users have about vendors, they only support Windows. Older Power Macs even had an entire PC subsystem in them so you could run Windows from within MacOS, namely the Power Mac 7300/180 PC compatible which had a Pentium 166 along with its PPC 604e. It could run PC apps on the native x86 ISA inside MacOS. You can still buy PCI add-in cards with an x86 subsystem for running Virtual PC. Read up before you say Macs are 100% proprietary.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'm so sick of seeing everyone carp about Macs not being upgradable. Ohhh you built your own PC you must be a technical genius...oh yeah you plugged some hardware together and stuck in a boot floppy, big damn whoop. One of the beauties of the entire Power Macintosh line was its PCI bus rather than the older and less cool NuBus. Besides the PCI bus which was compliant to all PCI standards was the face that the system critical stuff resided on a piece of silicon called the logic board. Something companies like Newer and Sonnet have done is make what they call "upgrade cards". In a real simple operation one can take an aging Power Mac and turn it into a pretty fast G3 or G4 system just be replacing the old logic board with a new one. The enhanced systems use the old memory stuff but the speeds are comparable to newer systems. For a total of about 800$ you can buy an older 9600 Power Mac on ebay and install a brand new G3/4 board on it. Most of the other parts are replacable since they use a SCSI or ATA bus. I can even put USB ports in said 9600 system. I used to think Macs weren't upgradable until I actually looked into it. Hell I could get said 9600 system to run Windows 98, 2000, or even x86 Linux. This post is a bit off topic but so are the "I'll never touch a Mac" people. I think the Appleseed project gives alot of credibility to the claims Apple and Motorola have made about the G4. Next they should make one of these clusters using iBooks, a room full of those buggers would be eerie.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Most benchmarks show the fastest G4 being somewhat slower than the fastest PIII - such as these from www.macinfo.de
Anonymous Coward: I wonder what it'd be like to build a beowulf out of these!
/: It is a frickin' beowulf, you turd!
Anonymous Coward: Oh yeah, right.
The build-a-beowulf joke has officially been beaten into the ground for the last time. Anyone who uses it at a future date will be liable for being beaten into the ground. You have been foreworned.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
take a look at the latest top500 list:
9 99&M=11
http://www.top500.org/lists/TOP500List.php3?Y=1
Cray is not dead just yet....
Comparing a beowulf cluster to a cray is just silly.
-nacks
"What are the clusters user for, BTW?"
A1: Playing Quicktime movies of an Aibo, really, really, fast.
A2: Trading Apple stock options.
hehe, "checked out their stock latey?". Like that has anything to do with anything.
---
Aww man, you just took the fun out us of making Beowulf jokes.</silly>
On a more serious note, are the comparisons fair? They seem to be using the same mhz values, but how well does a 450 mhz p2 compare with an apple g4? Most people wouldn't try to compare intel chips with alphas, for example. One way to determine this would be to try doing similar but simpler problems on single intel and single mac computers, and seeing how these two setups compared.
Why p2's and not p3's?
What parellel software are they using on the intel computers?
Were they able to determine why the apple computers run better in parellel than the intel computers? Was it because the intel computers ended up saturating the lines between them?
--
The shareholder is always right.
I think the idea was to see how easy it would be to set up a cluster with MacOS (MacOS is known for making things pretty simple.) I thought they were just using straight IP over Ethernet; does anybody use Appletalk anymore? That stuff was damn cool for it's time, but IP is obviously much more flexible. On another note, I'd like to see them make a LinuxPPC Beaowulf out of the same boxes and see how the results compare to doing it under MacOS.
Very true. Like I said, Apple is known for making things simple. The trouble is, you can never get at the underlying stuff and poke around. :) I love MacOS because of how easy it is to maintain, and I love Linux cause of how much I can explore and change things.
This isn't a Beowulf cluster. If you read the article they are using their own program to split processing between computers. It sounds to me like the techniques used are not so flexible (nor scalable) as Beowulf.
Nonethless it is a good demonstration of high processing power for low prices on machines other than x86s. (Alphas are too damn expensive). What's interesting is that they recommend further reading so that one can setup a Beowulf. I wonder how a Beowulf would perform in comparison (using the same number of computers etc). I'm guessing slower, becaus ethe scalabilityf also means a possibly higher protocol overhead.
--nullity--
I am nothing.
No offense, but...duh.
:)
I certainly have nothing against Mac hardware. The PPC processor is cooler and more elegant than what AMD is forced to use because of silly x86 compatibility. Yes, it sucked for people when Apple said "we're cutting everyone who ever bought computers from us off", but people got over it, and the PPC is much better for it.
However, those sorts of machines haven't really been practical for me to use. I'm still in college, and so I don't have lots of money around. Plus, I enjoy building my own systems, which is something I really can't do with PPC. Thanks to the modularity of PCs, I can upgrade my computer one bit at a time, cycling the parts down through various levels (I've got lots of little side projects, plus machines for my parents and brother, and juggling parts is fun
x86 has been the answer for me; with a decent hs/fan, my K6-3 runs plenty fast and cool for all my needs. Would a PPC system be nice? Surely. Do I really want to spend more money on a system that pretty much has to stay in one piece? Not really.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I build my own machines, because if anyone else did it for me, then they'd invariably do something wrong :) So, mine are probably a bit more expensive than your super-cheap PCs.
:) Whatever.
However, I'm certain that you can get more computing power from $800 worth of PC parts than an $800 iMac will provide. Also, I discredit the iMac, because it retains the thing I used to hate most about Mac hardware (the G4s are much better about this): non-modularity. As I said, I don't "buy computers". I buy a new video card if I want one, then shuffle my old one over here, the one it replaced over there, etc. My modem and floppy drive have lasted me through 4 generations of CPU and RAM upgrades, because they are still perfectly good. My sound card has lasted 3 generations, etc. The video card is less than 6 months old, and the CPU even newer. You still really don't have that flexibility with Mac hardware, and I would miss that too much.
Also, you pretty much buy Macs from Apple. Apple decides that you can't get floppy drives any more, and that you must get DVD-ROM or RAM (no option of CD-ROM), and that your smallest hard disk option is 10GB. What if I want to buy a bunch of cluster nodes? I DON'T want to spend money on:
1. Zip drives
2. More than 1-2 GB hard disk (fs will likely be distributed)
3. CD-ROM/DVD/whatever drives (I would do one unit, then make copies of the hard disk)
4. Big pile of keyboards and mice
5. Fancy video cards which will be displaying text for setup, then NOTHING unless they need maintenence.
With PCs, I can save that money by not buying those parts (buying super-cheap video cards in the case of #5), and put that money into faster CPUs, more RAM, etc. Or maybe I want to use that money to go see Depeche Mode!!
There are projects starting with non-Apple PPC stuff, and I'm paying close attention to them; PPC chips are cool and efficient, and I'd love to have them in something I consider useful.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Actually, this is great to see, too bad for Cray though they used to kick some serious ass in this sort of head to head processing prowess.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Yeah, it's not the same as it used to be. Crays HQ was just down the road from my house in Colorado Springs and they still seemed to be making a profit. Then when Mr. Cray pass away the company never quite recovered.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Prophet Systems builds PPC machines and components based on IBM's reference designs.
Bad pun there, but couldn't resist.
/each/ capable of 4.88GFLOPS).
The crays they compare to are pretty old beasts, and they only tested with a few processors (Cray's SV1 for example can take advantage of over 1200 cpus!).
Drop by http://www.sgi.com/sv1/tech_info.html
(or http://www.cray.com/) to see info on the SV1 if you're interested.
Now, don't get me wrong; this is a very nice cluster, but them seem to unfairly compare it to a cray (the t3e-900 is not even a recent machine!). I'm sure someone else will explain where computers such as crays and sgis come into real use (high-throughoutput work), but for distributed systems requiring less than gigatnic amounts of communication bandwidth, beowulfs do handle many kinds of tasks very well (and cheaply!).
Just didn't want eveyone to think a 16-node g4/g3 cluster was faster than a cray (actually, the sv1 can use cpus
There's a somewhat humorous portion to the instructions, although I'm not sure it was intended. Check them out:
.ucla.edu/appleseed/appleseedrecipe.html
:>
http://exodus.physics
Setting this up is as easy as 1, 2, 3 apparently (despite, well, paying for everything). After a 3 step process, they put a little note at the bottom:
"Note: To build a Beowulf, a Linux-based cluster, we think the following 230-page book is an excellent introduction: T. L. Sterling, J. Salmon, D. J. Becker, and D. F. Savarese, How to Build a Beowulf, [MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1999]."
A 230 page introduction?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
A beowulf cluster can be assembled with *multiple* network cards to decrease the network distance between each processor. Basically instead of the machines sharing a single network, there are several separate networks to split the traffic. The reason for this is that as traffic on Ethernet rises, it reaches a point where it hits a wall and throughput can really decline fast.
Appleseed is set up using the internal ethernet card (though I would guess you could use a different interface like a fiber optic connection) connected in the usual fashion to a regular switch. The article didn't mention any option to install more network cards and use those.
Now, for most things a shared 100M network will be suficient. Depending on your applications I would guess that a beowulf would be more configurable. If I were to make a 1024 node cluster, it would be a beowulf with the nodes arranged into a hypercube. Putting 1024 Macs onto a single beowulf might cause performance problems depending on what you're doing. Usually programs that don't require a lot of communications between nodes run best on beowulf type clusters, so the problem of having only one network card in a machine might be no big deal after all.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
What I'd like to see is a Beowulf cluster of iMacs -- one of each color, arranged in a little circle. It may not be as fast as a Cray, but now you've got the world's cutest Beowulf cluster!
Okay. As cool as this whole shebang sounds (and it does sound pretty damn cool), aren't we usually the ones who starts yelling "benchmarks are meaningless" whenever the guys in the Microsoft trenches pull off another one from their files? I say, stick with that position. Better a false negative than a false positive. So I'm sorry, but I don't care about these benchmarks anymore than I care about any of the Mindcraft series, and that's that.
(Not that I wouldn't like a nice cluster of Macs, mind you. Ummm. Tasty.)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Note: To build a Beowulf, a Linux-based cluster, we think...
;)
The funny part is that the slashdot story-posting perl scripts didn't post this story twice for mentioning both linux and beowulfs.
C'mon, CmdtTaco! Release the source to the story-posting perl scripts, already!
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Guess Crays aren't quite what they used to be. Maybe they should make them in grape colors :) Sharkey
http://www.badassmofo.com
I actually had an honor of working with one of these clusters at a famous university Plasma Physics Lab. Several points here. Do not forget that the benchmarks advertized are for UCLA's particular gyrokynetic code done in F77. The gyrokinetic code usually doesn't require a lot of communication anyway, so for small clusters slow networking is not much of a problem. That is why Beowulf clusters are so suitable for problems where you don't have much inter-node traffic. Crays use very high bandwidth interconnects which are expensive and not needed for particle code like this. The difference is in code implementation and the CPU. Also Crays use Alpha as their processor, and Alphas are very good at FP intensive code, but they need a lot of code tweaking to squeeze all of the performance Alpha can give. Once the code runs great on an Alpha, put it on a different CPU and you have it crawling (and vice/versa). The lab that I worked for had Fortran 90 gyrokinetic code which was basically accomplishing the same thing as UCLA's, BUT it ran 3 times faster on a 400 MHz Alpha, than on G3 350 MHz using AppleSeed. Network-wise scaling it on G3s was not a big problem (small cluster, not much IP traffic), should note MacOS would be unresponsive during the benchmarks completely; while the code was running (all of CPU was devoted to it, and MacOS doesn't do preemtive multitasking). Surprizingly UCLA's code runs very nicely on G3, just as fast, or better than it does on an Alpha, that's why Macs are so suitable for them (besides plug-n-play Beowulf factor). So I think comparing their results to an archaic Cray is a nice way of attracting attention, but when it comes to details it's just another Beowulf. Put a different code that does well on Cray on it, and it's 2/3s slower per processor. Though I must say, that availability of this kind of software is great, since research facilities have tons of Macs and CPU cycles. This software also eliminates a need for *nix sysadmining, but it is costly. Fortran compilers are expensive, and so are Macs. If I would be building a cluster and didn't have Macs off hand, I would use cheap PC labor and Linux (though would still have to pay around a grand for F90 compiler per license :(). What *nix offers is compatibility, flexibility, and preemtive multitasking, and it allows to run several parallel jobs at a time. Traditionally Beowulf software was written for *nix, and so many MPI implementations and other essential software (like FFFTW and other math/scientific libraries) are available primarily for *nix, and would have to be ported to MacOS or any other OS.
Don't believe all this hype and go sell your Crays just yet. What many people fail to realize is that the total number of achievable MFLOPS of all the nodes in a parallel machine IS NOT a very meaningful measure of how powerful or useful the machine is. This ignores the nature of the interconnect between the processors, memory, etc., which is *extremely* important in most parallel computations, and is what makes supercomputers so damned expensive. This stuff is not Ethernet! For many types of parallel applications, Ethernet becomes such a bottleneck that no advantages can be realized from parallelizing an application.
The generation of fractal clusters is a classic example of what are known as "embarassingly parallel" problems in parallel computing circles. As you iterate points in the set, their evolution is independent, so a minimum of message passing is required. (In computer science-ese, "the computational graph is disconnected"). With even the crummiest of interconnects, you can get good results out of parallelizing these fractal cluster generators because the only thing that will really make a difference is the total number of FLOPS acheivable by each of the nodes. Fractal set generation is just not a very meaningful benchmark.
But consider, say, a finite-element model where every point in your grid is affected by its neighbors. Then you need to do lots of message passing, and the nature of the interconnect becomes orders of magnitude more important. In this case, I guarantee you that a commercial supercomputer is going to beat the pants off of any cluster machine. This is not to say that cluster machines aren't useful, but a real "supercomputer" still has its place.
I attended ucla as a physics major while this project was still under way, and took a more basic, introduction to computer modelling of plasma systems. The professor doing a lot of the work in this field is John Dawson. Along with him, and IIRC, more in charge of the computer systems, is Victor Decyk.
Decyck taught half of the class, although he was technically a TA. He explained the progression away from high $$ "super computers", such as Crays, and the usefulness of clusters.
I also had the honor of working at JPL, where Decyk was a part-time scientist in the computing/analysis department for the Experimental Measurment Devices group.
If you look up something like "computer plasma modelling" on the 'net, you'll very likely find papers by these two...very interesting high-powered stuff - the mind boggles at just how much the computer is crunching when you realize that a large number of the plasma particles are interrelated spatially.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)