The Hydra Portal
The Hydra Portal is a virtual supercomputer that comprises idle computers in the Student Technology Centers (STC) at Indiana University Bloomington. When a computer has been idle for fifteen minutes, it is automatically given a job to run. If a user types or moves the mouse, the job is immediately cancelled and the computer becomes available to the user. The cancelled job is then restarted on a different, idle STC computer.
The computers in the STCs are a tremendous resource, with aggregate theoretical peak processing power well over a Teraflop. There are many hours each week when these computers are idle, and those unused computers are an important source of additional research computing power— additional power the can be used by IU researchers as well as those using the TeraGrid. The Hydra Cluster makes good use of these additional processors without interfering with the primary use of the computers, and adapts effortlessly to the ever-changing availability of the computers in the STCs.
- Simple Message Brokering Library (SMBL). The SMBL enables parallel computing on sporadically available and radically unreliable compute nodes. The SMBL server tracks assigned tasks and sends messages to the content owner.
- Process and Port Manager (PPM). A PPM program manages resources (processes, ports, etc.) being used by multiple parallel sessions, which in turn implements SMBL. PPM alerts the user of the assigned SMBL server and tracks both the user and the task.
- Condor server for job management.
- Portal for authentication and job submission.