Beowulf Cluster for Computer-Intensive Research

描述(由申请人提供)： 计算机硬件和软件的进步极大地提高了研究人员可用的计算能力，使他们能够解决一些问题，比如解码人类基因组，这些问题在10年前似乎是无法克服的。Beowulf集群是可用于并行计算的多计算机系统，由于其性价比是传统超级计算机的3到10倍，在计算革命中发挥了重要作用。这项提议的目标是获得一个Beowulf集群，以缓解制约NIH资助的马萨诸塞大学医学院研究人员的计算瓶颈。该集群将形成核心设施的核心，可供NIH资助的所有医学院研究人员使用，研究人员为NIH提交的材料寻求初步结果。在本提案中记载的许多方法中，拟议集群的计算能力的可用性将促进该提案的个别项目的科学性。它们从使研究人员能够使用具有巨大计算要求的新的数据收集技术和实验方法，到使用系统紧密耦合的节点来执行计算，这些计算实际上不能在单个处理器上执行。该集群的计算能力还将使调查人员能够减少他们在设计拟议调查时因可用计算资源有限而作出的近似和妥协。随着生物信息学、结构生物学、分子生物物理学和成像领域的新研究人员被招募到该大学，未来对该集群的需求只会增加。最后，核心设施还将为来自不同学科的研究人员提供互动的机会，并分享计算算法和方法。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Advances in computer hardware and software have dramatically improved the compute capabilities available to researchers allowing them to tackle problems such as decoding the human genome that seemed insurmountable even a decade ago. Beowulf clusters, which are multi-computer systems that can be used for parallel computations, have played a significant role in the compute revolution due to their performance / price ratio being 3 to 10 times that of traditional supercomputers. The goal of this proposal is to obtain a Beowulf cluster to relieve the computing bottleneck restricting the investigations of the NIH funded researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The cluster that will form the nucleus of a CORE facility available to all NIH funded investigators at the medical school, and investigators seeking preliminary results for NIH submissions. There are a number of ways documented in this proposal in which the availability of the computational power of the proposed cluster would advance the science of the individual projects of this proposal. They vary from enabling investigators to use new data collection technologies and experimental approaches which have immense computation requirements to using the tightly coupled nodes of the system to perform calculations, which could not realistically be performed on a single processor. The computing power of the cluster would also allow investigators to reduce the approximations and compromises they made in the design of their proposed investigations that were necessitated by the limited computational resources available to them. The need for the cluster will only increase in the future as new investigators in the areas of bio-informatics, structural biology, molecular biophysics, and imaging are recruited to the university. Finally, the CORE facility will also provide the opportunity for investigators from diverse disciplines to interact, and share computational algorithms and approaches.