Colin Harrington

When I was studying at Bethel College (now Bethel University) located in Arden Hills, Minnesota, I took a class called on Parallel Programming taught by Dr. Brian Turnquist.  I have to say that this class was my favorite.  I would stay up late just to solve the problems and projects that were presented to us.  I loved it!!!

We had a 40 CPU Beowulf cluster that we were able to work with.  It was a pretty standard AMD Dual Processor Configuration on a 10/100mbps ethernet network (which was usually the bottleneck).  Several students had the opportunity to help design and setup the cluster.  The cluster had its own housing inside one of the Computer Science labs. 

We ended up writing C++ programs that utilized MPI to communicate.  We ran calculations, rendered fractals, and simulated breaking passwords in a distributed form; Well maybe not passwords, but finding the seed and depth of how to replicate a series of "random" number’s generated by the stock random number generator could be easily substituted with other code .  I won’t get into how important the RNG (Random Number Generator) is to our modern systems (1,2) but it was a fun exercise none-the-less.  I ended up using the cluster briefly to render some intensive POV-Ray Fractals (See the contest results). 

I’ve always loved the concept of distributed computing.  I was really excited when I learned of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).  The concept of Pay as you go applied to Distributed computing is an interesting one!  And having a top-tier datacenter and Simple Storage Services (S3) makes it an attractive solution.  The concept of building scalable web applications is one that has caught my eye. 

I have some good ideas on how to utilize this service but haven’t made time to finish the concepts.  The Amazon Web Services crew have really started to round out ther services with the announcement of Persistent Storage for EC2 and SimpleDB.  Persistent Storage is, in my humble opinion, one of the last things that they needed to solve to service a fully viable, scalable, pay as you go/grow computing platform.