Professor of moth and computer science Dr. Steve Bober informs senior Patrick Dorbee about the parallel computer cluster on Nov 3. As of 2010, Bober hod been at Harding for 28 years. Ashe/ Parsons On jon. 2L Dr. Steve Bober takes time to work on his computer after a day of teaching classes. ""The most rewording aspect of teaching is the chance to observe the students as they progress from their freshman year to graduation and beyond," Bober said. Ashe/ Parsons I n t he fa II of 201 o. mathematics and computer science professor Dr. Stephen Baber, along with students in his parallel programming class, made a technological breakthrough when they successfully assembled a 64-parallel cluster computer. According to Baber, parallel programming was the process of writing a program that ran on multiple computers simultaneously, cutting down the time in which a task was performed. Parallel cluster computers were used around the world to solve complex problems that required more power than what was available in a single computer; in fact, most of the fastest computers in the world were simply clusters of many smaller computers running together. Baber's computer cluster, named "Pleiades" by his team, ran on 64 central processing units as opposed to the two found in most computers. Baber said he chose to purchase the equipment in order to help prepare students for the demands of their future careers. "Today's programmers are increasingly confronted with the need to master the abi Iity to write parallel programs," Baber said . "I have heard that if you are not familiar with parallel programming in the next five years, then you are not a programmer." Senior Paul Sherrod, who worked on Baber's team, said the development of the cluster computer was very significant for Harding because it opened the door for further computer research. ~~®~® Baber professor builds computer "All of the top computer science schools have supercomputers like this one that are very fast and allow users to do research in really any field that needs computations," Sherrod said. "Now Harding has a computer like this too. This computer also gives students the ability to work on a supercomputer and to see where computers are going in the future and gives them hands on experience that will be a great asset when they graduate and go on to programming in the real world." Sherrod added that building the cluster was tricky at times, but Baber's expertise helped -~tudents along while allowing them to actually interact with their work. . "Dr. Baber was great to ~rk with on this project," Sherrod said. "He always comes up with great projects for us that we normally wouldn't get to experience, such as b~i1C11ng a supercomputer. His giving us the opportunity to actually bui ld~he computer rather than just use it made it meaningful and gives us motivation to do well when programming it because of the sense of ownership. Baber planned to assign the project to his parallel programming class every year and also hoped that each year would increase the cluster's performance. "I'm hopeful that as time goes on we'll be able to add to and improve upon the cluster," Baber said. "I'm also hopeful that it will prove useful as a powerful computing resource to other science departments." Ryan Orr faculty 155
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