All Mechanical Engineering faculty and their students working on research projects are eligible for accounts on the beowulf system. A set of guidelines has been developed by the Department Computer Utilization Committee (CUC). The following guidelines for usage and access to the beowulf system are based on the corresponding Clemson University High Performance Computing Systems Access and Usage Policy. Specifically:

(1) All accounts on the beowulf computer cluster are for parallel computations only. In order to maintain this policy no serial software will be installed on the system. The policy agreed upon by the CUC, and consistent with DCIT, is that running two or more `cases' of a serial program at the same time does not constitute parallel programming.

(2) All debugging work parallelizing a code to be run on the beowulf will be conducted on another computer. The school has an 8 CPU SUN computer called `hubcap' which is expressly for this purpose. This frees up the system time for production runs, rather than debugging.

(3) Any Mechanical Engineering faculty member can apply to the committee for an account. Students and postdocs working on a research thesis/project can also apply with the approval of their advisor. The only purpose for the application is to assure the committee that the code is truly parallel and can make use of the beowulf properly. Requests should be submitted, either formally or informally, to the chair of the CUC who will serve as laison to the system administrator for the system.

(4) Users should adhere to the time sharing system chosen by the system adminstrator. The particular system employed will be determined by the system administrator based on current system demand.

(5) No backups will be performed on the beowulf. Users are expected to remove large data sets regularly to other locations. The beowulf should not be used as an archival storage system.

The current beowulf hardware and software specifications are maintained at:
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/~rm/beowulf.html

The current beowulf time sharing system is maintained at:
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/~rm/tshare.html

An introductory tutorial on parallel programming can be found at:
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/~rm/compute.html