No More Slothful Hardware

Mechanical Engineering, Feb 2007 by Thilmany, Jean

COMPUTERS ARE LAZY. They work only when they have to and almost all of them spend most of their time loafing.

The hardware at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., however, has developed a hard-work ethic. The university's computers are in almost continuous use, thanks to a distributed computing approach that sends work to the computers day and night, according to Gerry McCartney, Purdue's interim vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

"A corporation's CFO sees that computers are 1,000 times more powerful than they were 15 years ago and wonders, 'Why aren't we producing more with them?' If you think about it for more than 90 seconds it doesn't make sense," McCartney said.

So Purdue officials decided to put computer downtime to good use.

Today at the university, more than 4,300 computers of all sizes-from desktop machines used by students to large research computers-are linked in what's known as a pool. If a computer anywhere in the pool becomes available, even for a few minutes, a waiting job is sent to it for processing.

To enable this type of distributed computing, Purdue uses a version of an open source application called Condor, developed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison specifically for scientists and engineers. Today, businesses like investment bank J.P. Morgan Chase and semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology use Condor, too.

Michael Ryan, chief technologist of the computing backbone for J.P. Morgan Chase, said computing cycles are sometimes referred to as MIPS, an acronym for millions of instructions per second.

"A MIP is a terrible thing to waste," Ryan said. "On Wall Street, how many calculations you can get done in an eight-hour window can mean gigantic savings for the bank in real dollars. The more accurately you can model your risk, the more money you can save your company."

At Purdue, the computers in the Condor pool are used roughly 45 percent of the time for their intended purpose and 45 percent to run Condor jobs, McCartney said. They get to take a computing equivalent to a coffee break the other 10 percent of the time.

"People are looking past this technology because it's not sexy," he said. "Technology people are interested in new machines and big-iron computers. But distributed computing is the future, whether it's sexy or not."