undergrad senior project idea, help

[Jim Meyer]

Hello!

If I understood your question correctly, you're interested in being able
to make additional business cases to your school's administrators to
explain why purchasing the gear to construct a cluster would continue to
be useful to the school as well as an interesting project. If I've got
it wrong, please ignore the rest. =]

After a glance at the your university's catalog, I see that you've got
both engineering and science schools with majors in Physics, Engineering
Physics, Biology, Applied Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer
Engineering. 

Any of these disciplines might have uses for a computing cluster. While
I'm no expert in any of those fields -- I'm not even a qualified
amateur! -- here's a fast crib sheet of potential applications for those
majors.

- Your biologists may want to use some of the same applications 
  (BLAST, CHARMM, etc.) as are currently used in the field
- Those in physics-related disciplines may be interested in doing 
  all manner of simulations (high-energy, plasma, CFD, etc.). Search
  the list archives for the author "Robert G. Brown" for many (!) 
  well-reasoned bits of insight into that area.
- Your engineers might like to use a cluster to help speed along their 
  electronic design and simulation work.

...and there's no limit to how much Computer Science can be Applied to
writing software for a cluster. They'll learn terms like MPI, PVM, NUMA,
and others that shouldn't be shared in public. =] 

Oh, and then there's animation and visual effects, but we're a small,
noisy crowd that's mostly caught up in distributed computing (lots of
boxes, each independent of the others). But we get to make pretty
pictures and other folks seem to like 'em.

For more information and applications, I'd recommend doing some searches
in the list archives at:
   http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=beowulf&r=1&w=2

Hope that's helpful!

--j
-- 
Jim Meyer, Geek At Large                              purp at wildbrain.com