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| from North Tama County Community Schools, Traer, Iowa, writes: |
| We had our AiS expo today, and although we did not take
first (no trip to DC), we took third in
advanced math and took the Student Choice award. We did very well. |
| AiS stands for Adventures in Supercomputing. It is a
government (Dept. of Energy) sponsored
organization run by Ames Laboratory and Krell Institute Our team consisted of: Paul Whannel (11th Grade) Ben Meisgeier (11th) Sean Lyons (10th) Tyler Sell (10th) Marcus Ernster (12th) Michael Dennis (12th) |
| Project summary:
We realize that not all laboratories and institutions that would need to take advantage of parallel processing own the fastest and newest equipment. So we didn't want to use brand-new equipment. We wanted to see how difficult and efficient a cluster of Macs in an existing lab would be. Using 12 of the 18 Power Macintosh 5400/120 computers, hooked up to a 10BaseT hub, and connected to other hubs and a router. That means that there was no network interruption. With the troubleshooting of Dr. David Halstead (Ames Scalable Computing Laboratory) and the software developed by Viktor Decyk and Dean Dauger (UCLA), we were able to make the cluster come alive. Several benchmarking trials later, we were impressed with it's performance. Over 200 Mflops were achieved. We named this cluster "Pippin", in hopes that it would someday be a platform as common (and easy) as the Macintosh itself. |
| Judging criteria :
Verbal presentation (at preliminary stage) along with a posterboard display, after which time students vote for their favorite display. Judges then decide on eight teams to advance, and after lunch we gave a verbal/html presentation in front of a large meeting room. The rubric for the judging is available at: http://www.krellinst.org/AiS/ais_expo_notes.html There is no formal criteria for Student Choice, just who has the best looking display (and jelly beans). |
| Our school webpage is located at:
http://redhawk.n-tama.k12.ia.us and our project webpage will soon be in a subdirectory somewhere. |
| I would like to thank our AiS Mentors for all of the support that we received. We met several people at the expo without mentors at all, and I felt very lucky to have had the oppertunity to have five. All of your work was appreciated. Special thanks to Dr. David Halstead, who put up with us all for a day, and taught us all about networking, and to Dean Dauger from UCLA, for _all_ the help and tech support. We couldn't have done it without you. |
| Paul 'Mac Man' Whannel <whannel@redhawk.n-tama.k12.ia.us> |
Update: June 7, 1999