Daily Bulletin Online

They look like cast-offs from something that used to be important, the 14 computers stacked on shelves in a converted Harvey Mudd College storage closet in Claremont.

But the white bricks stripped of maker logos have collectively what computer buffs call a gigaflop of power, the ability to perform a billion calculations a second. Connected by a tangle of cables feeding into a high-speed communication switch, they have another significance: They are likely the first supercomputer at an undergraduate college anywhere in the United States.

"We have access to it whenever we please," said Lisette de Pillis, the mathematics professor responsible for bringing the supercomputer to campus. "We can upgrade it as we need. It's under our control in that sense"

Just because the supercomputer is the first for an undergraduate institution, it might not be a first among undergraduates. What Harvey Mudd bought could be purchased by anyone at a computer store with $25,000 burning a hole in his or her pocket. That means "maybe someone's building one in their dorm room," de Pillis said.

Supercomputers have the ability to perform calculations in seconds that would take

days for even the fastest of personal computers to do. They are what allow moviemakers to generate the special effects seen in films like "Toy Story" and "Titanic." They're the favorite forecasting tool of meteorologists who create complex climate models.

For de Pillis, this supercomputer is helping her simulate chemotherapy's effects on cancer tumor growth.

Besides cheap hardware, supercomputer users are also taking advantage of Linux, an operating system for large computer networks offered for free under its creators' philosophy of democratizing access to knowledge. The supercomputer at Mudd is evidence of power coming to the people.

"It does mean supercomputing for everyone," de Pillis said.

The computer's name - Hrothgar - refers to the king of the mead hall in the Old English epic Beowulf, also the name given by Caltech scientist Thomas Sterling to supercomputers whose components can be bought over the counter. Beowulf systems like Mudd's perform parallel computing, meaning each of the computers on the shelves is given one portion of a calculating task to do. Personal computers at home that work alone perform what's called scalar computing.

Across the hall from Sterling's office, Jan Lindheim offers tutorials to universities like Mudd interested in building their own supercomputers. Lindheim shares the Linux philosophy of knowledge for all.

"The nice thing is they don't have to rely on the big supercomputer centers anymore," said Lindheim.

Mudd's foray into the fast-computing realm is creating a stir on campus with students clamoring to get into de Pillis' Scientific Computing class so they can have access to the machine in the junk closet. Math students in her classes get to play with it starting next month.

Elsewhere, though, even more supercomputers threaten to make Hrothgar look puny. Already two or three computers with teraflop power, the ability to perform a trillion calculations a second, are in existence. At Caltech, Lindheim's colleagues are working on a computer with petaflop power, which would be 1,000 times faster than the teraflop.

To put the differences in speed in perspective, imagine climatologists wanting to predict the weather over the next two days. They take weather measurements in one-tenth kilometer segments up to an altitude of 20 kilometers and on the ground at markers spaced one-tenth a kilometer apart. Hrothgar, as fast as it is, would still need 23 days to take in all that data and come up with a weather model, de Pillis said. The teraflop systems over which Caltech hopes to leapfrog would need only a half-hour. A petaflop system would need less than a minute.

"What's a supercomputer today might be a PC in five years," Lindheim said.

Harvey Mudd does it quicker