Ron Jones, a computer science professor at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, likens the supercomputer his team developed to stone soup.
Referencing the European fable about travelers who persuade a village to give them ingredients to make soup, Jones said it was through a patchwork of donations and purchases that his team has been able to build HU’s first supercomputer.
HU’s supercomputer, which took three years to build and was completed in November 2018, is the one of the first to exist in the Harrisburg area.
Supercomputers – computers that can do more work in less time and require more power, funding and data storage – are highly applicable to a number of purposes, including simulations, weather and climate forecasting and biological modeling. At HU, students are using the supercomputers to complete data-heavy research. But they are also mastering their knowledge of supercomputers so that they can help other students understand how to use them.
Jones said these machines typically only exist at large universities and wealthy institutions.
“Before, you had to have a large data center, you had to have all of the environmental – the air conditioning, the building, power, all this other kind of stuff that was very, very expensive for supercomputing environments,” Jones said. “Well, we have demonstrated that you can build one of these that's functional, without all of that large cost or overhead that comes with those types of environments.”
Dr. Majid Shaalan, the head of the 14-person team that built HU’s supercomputer, said the project assists the democratization of computing, a field dominated by large companies like Google and Microsoft. He said that a goal of the project is to give members of the team experience in building supercomputers so that they can help others build them.
“We thought Harrisburg University, as an independent institution that's willing to get into the research arena, should have the kind of independence to do what we believe [we're] here to do, which is serving the community,” Shaalan said. “All our research findings and results are supposed to be dedicated to enhancing and improving life in the community here [in Harrisburg].”
He estimated that between donations, trainings, operational costs, and payments to students and workers, the project cost about $500,000. But, he said, it would cost much more if they had bought it from a large tech company. He credited support from university president Dr. Eric Darr; donations from Kunj Inc., a local technology company; and collaborations with labs around the country in helping to get the supercomputer off the ground.
“We created a great dynamic,” Shaalan said. “It’s the first project in the institution where students can get involved in building such modules and labs and [get] paid.”
A rack of computer processing units that are part of Harrisburg University's new supercomputer.
Jones said the supercomputer consists of a thousand processing units laid out on two large racks in HU’s downtown tower, and a cloud environment, which can store up to 263,000 gigabytes of information.
Through the cloud, the team can transport the computer’s load to a different system for maintenance and then receive the updated load when the system is finished working on it. This process is called cloud bursting.
According to Will Lieske, an undergraduate student researcher, the cloud lets the team work on different parts of the computer without having to buy extra hardware to store the information.
Beyond that, it’s a valuable educational tool that gives students hands-on experience.
“Many universities are educating their students for jobs in cloud technology, and all businesses are moving towards cloud technology,” Jones said.
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The supercomputer also has been helpful for people not involved in the building process. Jones said the team has been using containers, ready-to-go packages of software for a particular application, to teach supercomputer technology.
“You take the one or two that are willing to teach, and you just broadcast their lesson to a whole bunch of schools,” Lieske said. “If they need to do like a coding exercise in the class, we can develop what's called the container and duplicate that for every single student. And it's just as good as, as if every single student had the exact same computer purchased for them for that day.”
The next step, Jones said, is to get others involved in learning the technology and using it for research. He estimated the team received 15 to 20 requests to use the supercomputer for research.
Caitlin Campbell, an undergraduate student at HU majoring in forensics and biology, has had the opportunity to use the supercomputer to mine through FBI records on serial killers and create a database that can eventually be used by artificial intelligence to predict serial killer behavior.
“The dream is, if it actually works, we would like to hopefully use it in the policing world and the government world,” Campbell said.
Campbell said that through this research she has been able to learn a tremendous amount about computers. She said her project might be the greatest thing that has happened in her college career.
“It is so rewarding to be able to see how computers are working because we’re in the technology age now,” Campbell said. “If anybody is interested in it, please do it. It is absolutely incredible.”