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Campuses have always been the places of innovation. The presence of of a super computing facility in a campus can greatly aid in R&D associated with the campus. The students will get an exposure to super computing arena and they can contribute to indigenous projects.

But what if we can setup such a facility using the computers already present in the campus with no extra investment??? And what if the  implementation do not induce any bottleneck in the proper functioning of those computers. Well it was a project we where working on..for quiet a long time… So that we can setup a virtual supercomputing facility in a campus in a cost effective way..which uses the unused processing power of all computers present in the campus.

We have derived the idea of implementation from grid and volunteer computing notions. For those not so tech-savvy people who may stumble across these lines, Grid computing is a variant of distributed computing. Lets say someone has a very complex, resource draining program and a dozen computers. He designs the program in a such a manner that he could divide it into pieces of program each running autonomously in one of the computers and giving the same solution as if we used a very powerful computer with the the high capabilities the program demanded. So GRID computing is called a distributed computing form with loosely coupled (the computers will not have to communicate with each other in solving a problem assigned to them), Heterogenous (computers can be of diffrent forms,using diffrent latforms etc..) and geographically dispersed.

In volunteer computing any person with his mind bent a bit (towards the side of greater human cause) can donate a part of their pc’s computational power as a service. Many data intensive projects like the SETI@home runs on volunteer computing with people all around the world participating in it.

So in a campus we have the computers in labs as well as those in the hands of students. Using an Open Source  middle ware called BOINC we can pool the unused processing power of all these computers. Here we will be using something like cycle stealing where idle processor cycles will be nicked from the participating nodes to setup the required virtual super computer.

The concept in its essence is similar to a volunteer computing project but essentially the BOINC middle ware should be adapted to perform in a smaller arena with the maximum number of nodes being 200 or 300. For this we developed some changes to  the original BOINC as such like the development of a hierarchal tree searching technique, development of an IDS(Intrusion Detection System) etc..

I have tried to outline the basic concepts of this implementation in a not-so-techie manner. In the next post i will outline the technical procedure to setup the same in a campus and more details on the changes we made to BOINC s/w..

And for those techie guys who i am sure will be bit disappointed after skimming through this – BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing. It is an architecture developed by David Anderson to support GRID based projects.It is available in open source..thanks to those great minds.. And it is this middle-ware which integrates various nodes present in the virtual supercomputing facility, enabling them to interact with each other and manage multiple work modules…

Technical Procedure To Set Up the Virtual Supercomputer

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