A small school in Maryland followed the lead of Virginia Tech and the University of Illinois by building a new cluster composed of Apple Xserves.

Bowie State University has built a $1 million supercomputer in cooperation with Apple Computer, Inc. XSEED is a 224-node cluster based on Apple's Xserve G5. Using Apple's Mac OS X Server interface, each server is equipped with dual 2GHz G5 processors and is interconnected with a Myrinet 4 Gbit/sec switch. The combination of this cutting edge technology places XSEED among the world's top 100 most powerful supercomputers. The supercomputing cluster will enable high-end graphics, animation, and complex computational problems among other capabilities.

Professor Mark Matties, the technical lead for the cluster project, gives credit to BSU's president, Dr. Calvin Lowe, for having the vision and leadership to bring the idea to life.

“He had been mulling over the possibilities, but had not identified anyone at BSU who could actually build it,” says Matties. “I had sent in a very modest grant proposal to build a small infrastructure to do some research using Dave Anderson's BOINC framework.”

Matties never thought that his proposal would attract much attention as it made it through the Department Chair, Dean, Provost, VP for External Relations and finally to the president all in one piece. Eventually though, Matties received a call from Lowe asking Matties to build the much more substantial Xseed cluster.

After seeing what was possible at Virginia Tech with Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan and the System X, Matties and Lowe knew that Apple was their first choice for cluster computing. Their efforts were not without help, though.

“The MIE (Model Institutions for Excellence) program was critical in building the Xseed and will continue to be so,” added Matties.

MIE is a fellowship program in which students receive a stipend and, in return, perform weekly duties for 15 hours total. Matties admits that his students were interested right away.

“While the permanent home for the Xseed on campus was under construction, we had temporary facilities in the Computer Science building. My group was up most of the night several times assembling the Xseed and performing initial tests,” Matties said. “They fully appreciate what we have here and what is means to be a part of it.”

All of BSU will see the cluster's benefits. While professors will be allowed to use the supercomputing cluster for research, the initiative is also expected to increase grant opportunities and attract business partnerships. The relationships with businesses can range from simply selling cycle time to a full-fledged collaboration.

XSEED is an extraordinary resource that will provide a computing environment to enhance teaching, learning, and research at the university. “This is such an exciting opportunity,” says Dr. Diane Krichmar, special assistant to the president and administrative lead for the project. “What's really amazing is that a school our size would engage in something like this in order to create this sense of excitement.”

Xseed will benefit the community as well. BSU is planning to start a new bioinformatics degree program that will train students for local jobs in the burgeoning field.

BSU is currently looking for funding to increase the Xseed's compute nodes to 256. The next step is to get people using it. Outreach has begun across campus, and the cluster team has several cluster enabled software packages, such as Mathematica.

“We also need to get the word out that BSU has world class computing resources and the people to use it,” Matties modestly added.

The supercomputing cluster is housed in the Center for Learning and Technology. For more information on the supercomputing cluster, contact Prof. Mark Matties at (301) 860-3974 or via email at [email protected].