The dean and the flying machine

Mark Sharer, director of development in the College of Engineering, left; Amr Elnashai, dean of engineering; and Jeffrey Croft, Boeing's director of engineering for Systems LCPT-787 Program, stand in front of an engine for the company's 787 Dreamliner aircraft.

Mark Sharer, director of development in the College of Engineering, left; Amr Elnashai, dean of engineering; and Jeffrey Croft, Boeing’s director of engineering for Systems LCPT-787 Program, stand in front of an engine for the company’s 787 Dreamliner aircraft.

Engineering Dean Amr Elnashai was in the Pacific Northwest this week, visiting with alumni and Penn State industry partners, including Boeing.

The dean ventured to the firm’s Seattle manufacturing facility and was giving a special behind-the-scenes tour by Jeffrey Croft (’81 CompSci), director of engineering for Systems LCPT-787 Program in the company’s commercial airplanes division.

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Breaking down the U.S. News rankings

Earlier this week, U.S. News & World Report released its “2014 Best Colleges Rankings,” where Penn State was ranked No. 8 among all public national universities and the College of Engineering was ranked No. 19 among undergraduate engineering programs.

U.S. News ranked the following undergraduate programs:

  • Aerospace Engineering: 12th
  • Chemical Engineering: 17th
  • Civil Engineering: 14th
  • Engineering Science and Mechanics: 10th
  • Industrial Engineering: 6th
  • Materials: 10th
  • Mechanical Engineering: 16th

The University’s undergraduate programs in biological engineering, bioengineering, computer engineering and electrical engineering were not ranked.

According to U.S. News, the undergraduate results are based solely on the peer judgments of deans and senior faculty who rated each program using a scale of 1 to 5 in a mail survey.

U.S. News does not include the disciplines of architectural engineering, computer science and nuclear engineering as part of its survey.

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Circle of supercomputer life

When the College of Engineering’s Mufasa Beowulf computer cluster was inaugurated in 2003, it would have been ranked 195th in the world among supercomputers had the machine been submitted for consideration.

During its lifetime, the Mufasa supercomputer handled more than 136,000 jobs and logged 2.5 million computing hours.

During its lifetime, the Mufasa supercomputer handled more than 136,000 jobs and logged 2.5 million computing hours.

Mufasa was purchased with funding from the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. It sported 162 processors paired across 81 machines.

Eric Prescott, a systems administrator in computer science and engineering, said, “Part of the reason it got the ‘Mufasa’ name is the grant was CEMBA [Consortium for Education in Many-Body Applications], which was close to ‘Simba,’ and Paul’s [former faculty member Paul Plassmann] son loved ‘The Lion King’ at the time.”

Faculty from a number of disciplines, including chemistry, physics, mathematics, material science, aerospace engineering, computer science and engineering and polymer science utilized Mufasa during its life.

From 2004 to 2012, Mufasa handled 136,102 jobs and logged 2.5 million computing hours.

But all good things must come to an end and Mufasa was recently decommissioned.

“It was the first cluster I helped design, build and maintain till death,” Prescott said. “It was a sad day.”

More on Mufasa can be found at http://www.cse.psu.edu/mufasa/details.inc.

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