Supercomputing: The Video Game

[dhilipkumar]

Supercomputing: The Video Game

In the vast field of technology, supercomputing stands as one of the least accessible disciplines. It's an area where borderline wizardry occurs — people harness the power of thousands of machines to simulate nuclear explosions, predict the weather or model chemical reactions.

Purdue University has taken a small step toward introducing basic supercomputing functions to the common man –- or at least its computer science students. It's developed a geeky version of the Whac-A-Mole game, dubbed Rack-A-Node.In hardware lingo, a rack is a cabinet that holds server computers, and a node is shorthand for a server itself. The online game challenges people to fill up three racks with servers best able to handle a variety of different scientific tasks. A chemistry job might require more computing horsepower, a physics job might demand more memory and something involving a large database could require faster network connections.

The object is to find the right balance of hardware to fit the given task. It's esoteric stuff, but Purdue sees it as a way of encouraging students to think about this technology."This is a dry and boring topic even for geeks," said Gerry McCartney, the chief information officer at Purdue. "So, we wanted a way to get people excited about these things."

The university has challenged students and professors to make the game more sophisticated and turn it into an actual teaching tool."It is not stupid right now, but it's way too simple," McCartney said.

The game is also an excuse for Purdue to draw some attention to itself as the annual Supercomputing conference draws near.Every year, hundreds of the world's top computer scientists gather to celebrate their powerful machines which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The conference takes place this year in Austin, Tex., starting Nov. 15.As the conference opens, a new list of the world's fastest 500 machines will be released. Due to ever-increasing chip speeds, the machines on this list tend to change quite dramatically from year to year."They lose value even faster than a car," Mr. McCartney said. "You buy it and then four years later, you throw the thing out into the parking lot and put a forklift through it. But, having said that, there is real science that gets done along the way."Purdue seems to have an unusually high humor threshold when it comes to computer science.

For example, Douglas Comer, a professor of computer science there and vice president of research at Cisco Systems, has a Web site that details how to insult a computer scientist and how to stump students taking oral exams.Mr. Comer also has a paper on how to obtain tenure at a university, which includes this advice: "Schedule an emergency meeting of the tenure committee when all members are out of town (note, this should not be hard to achieve because tenured professors spend many weeks each semester on vacation). Write an anonymous note to all members that says the vote was taken without them."