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.

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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