undergrad senior project idea, help

[Karen Keadle-Calvert]

Assuming you're talking about high school ... I think a cluster at 
school would mostly be used as a learning tool - it could be applied to 
several subjects.  I think it has obvious applications in computer 
science (eg. high performance computing, clustering concepts, parallel 
programming (http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich), Linux operating 
system, etc.)  A biology class could use it to learn about genomics.   
There's a sequence analysis tool called BLAST from NIH that you can get 
free (http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST).   It seems like there ought to be 
a good application for math as well.  A math teacher might be able to 
provide some good ideas - some problem that requires a lot of 
computation.  There's a program called linpack that is used to analyze 
and solve linear equations.  It's frequently used as a computing 
benchmark tool (http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/hpl/).

The good thing is that the cluster can be shared among all of the 
classes.  Personally, I think the "cool" factor is justification enough ;-)

Karen Calvert


Matt Osborne wrote:

>For my project I had the idea of building a beowulf with linux for
>my school. My problem is understanding what applications/uses for the
>school that the beowulf will bring.. I trying to get it together so
>that I can explain to the school what will be the result besides a
>cool machine! thanks Matt
>
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