CISE Research Resources: A Low Cost Parallel and Distributed Systems Laboratory

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EIA-0130806 Jie WuFlorida Atlantic UniversityCISE Research Resources: A Low Cost Parallel and Distributed Systems LaboratoryThe proposed project includes three parallel applications on a Beowulf cluster. The chief advantage of a Beowulf cluster is its superb price/performance ratio: the proposed cluster will obtain performance in the 3-5 Gigaflop range, for less than one tenth the cost of a comparably powered supercomputer. The low cost parallel and distributed systems laboratory consists of a 16-node Beowulf cluster. Each node is similar to an off-the-shelf PC without a monitor or keyboard. The nodes are networked by 100 Mbit Fast Ethernet lines. Each node will run both Linux and Windows/NT. Three parallel applications are proposed: (1) A parallel system for ecological modeling, with its focus on minimizing the simulation time of parallelized ecological models. A central component will be porting NOAA's NNT-SMS rectilinear parallel modeling package to the Beowulf architecture, (2) A Java runtime framework on Beowulf clusters for parallel execution of multithreaded processes. A new lottery-based job stealing algorithm will be studied for efficient scheduling of large-scale multithreaded computation. (3) Optimal configuration selection for accuracy enhancement of programmable machines. A genetic algorithm solution will be studied to enhance the accuracy of programmable machines. The success of this project will demonstrate the usefulness of Beowulf clusters as a cost-effective alternative to the supercomputer.