Is There a Use for a Public Beowulf?

Anonymous Coward asks: "If the average Slashdot reader had access to a Beowulf cluster, what would they use it for? Everyone seems to think that Beowulf clusters are fairly interesting, but does anyone have any particular job they would assign to one? If someone were to create a publically accessible Beowulf cluster, what would you do with it? Is there even a demand for such a beast?" Now this would be a neat hack, but the logistics behind running such a thing would be immense. But even though something like this may not be needed now this might not necessarily be so in the future. Something like this might be a great tool for that novice astronomer in the neighborhood ... or aspiring mathematicians in high school.

Comments

Some Thoughts....

[FigWig]

You'd need to develop some sort of queueing system so that users could submit there jobs, specifying the number of processors, length of calculation, etc. and then the batch system could optimally run the jobs. At least thats how they do it on supercomputers that I have used.

What would be neat is if a LUG would team up with a school district and develop a system at a particular high school that would be a resource for the whole district to use for science projects or whatever. The LUG could help develop a cirriculum that could be taught in workshops at the different schools.

You'd need a huge one to be successful

[barzok]

My junior/senior year, the local LUG set up a 5-node Beowulf. Nice little system, but I never saw more than one person at a time use it.

If 10 people all want to use it at the same time, what happens? They're all fighting for resources (RAM/CPU). May as well do it on your desktop. Or am I missing something?

A public-access Beowulf would need either a LOT of nodes, or very strict user scheduling (user A gets 2 hours on Tuesday, user B gets 4 horus on Wednesday, etc.)

(setenv HOMERSIMPSON=1)Mmmm...Beowulf...

[StandardDeviant]

Well, in addition to being a computer geek, I love chemistry. Problem is, most chemical simulation software (as opposed to pretty opengl visualization software) is either very expensive or very memory/cpu cycle hungry (model water on your PC, no problem, model a 40,000 carbon biopolymer, watch your Athlon go up in smoke along with your RAM... ;^) ), or (very frequently) both.

But if some entity (.gov or .edu) had an open access beowulf with things like NAMD, Gaussian, Molpac, Moldy, (etc etc etc) loaded on it, that would allow the chemically-inclined members of the populace to actually get real data right now instead of having to get a PhD in order to have access to a {Beowulf | Cray | whatever}.

Another option immeadiately presents itself: Massively Parallelized Povray. :^) For making pretty pictures of the molecule you just spent 5,000 cpu-hours modeling. Or 3d renderings of Natalie Portman's ass covered in hot grits, if you want to skip the chemistry bit...

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