Hampshire College

Cluster Computing Facility

Institute for Computational Intelligence
Adele Simmons Hall
School of Cognitive Science
Hampshire College

Faculty
Lee Spector, Director (lspector@hampshire.edu)
Jaime Davila (jdavila at hampshie.edu)
Chris Perry (perry at hampshire.edu)

Systems Support
Wm. Josiah Erikson (josiah at insanetechnology.com)



The Hampshire College Cluster Computing Facility houses a high-performance Beowulf-style computer cluster called fly. Fly runs the award-winning open-source, GNU/Linux CentOS-based free clustering software, ROCKS (www.rocksclusters.org), which made it possible for us to create one cluster from heterogeneous hardware. It has a total of 229.5 GB of RAM and 158 processors in 30 nodes, with 3798.2 GB of disk storage. This cluster is made available to both faculty and students, and gets used for many things: evolutionary computation research, genetic programming, and 3d rendering, just to name a few.

More information about fly, including the current status of the cluster, is available from the fly web page: http://fly.hampshire.edu.

The Facility resides in Adelle Simmons Hall on the Hampshire College campus. The room was custom designed and built for housing computing clusters with dedicated cooling, discrete AC power, and a concrete slab floor.

Funding for the Hampshire College Cluster Computing Facility has been provided by several sources including Hampshire College support for the Institute for Computational Intelligence, a grant from the National Science Foundation for Acquisition of Instrumentation for Research in Genetic Programming, Quantum Computation, and Distributed Systems, and a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory for the study of Multi-type, Self-adaptive Genetic Programming for Complex Applications.

The Cluster Computing Facility was formerly known as the Beowulf Computer Laboratory. For general information on Beowulf-style computer clusters see http://www.beowulf.org/.