[CLUE-Admin] Please put this on the CLUE North page for September meeting -- Gus

[Jan Mandel]

Here is the abstract and bio. Please  confirm.
Please resend location and time, also your URL.
Thanks

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The Beowulf Cluster at the University of Colorado at Denver

Jan Mandel and Russ Boice
Center for Computational Mathematics
University of Colorado at Denver

This talk will give an overview of the cluster, namely
- the hardware and software configuration
- what the choices were and why we ordered what we did
- what burned and why we did not make Top 500
- what eventually worked and how long it took
- what software projects we have
- what we would do the next time

The home page of the cluster is
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/ccm/beowulf/


Jan Mandel got his PhD in Numerical Mathematics in 1983 from the Charles
University, Prague, Czechoslovakia, and has been a Professor of
Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Denver since 1986. He has
been the Director of the Center for Computational Mathematics since 
2001.
He is an author or editor of six books and over sixty research papers. 
His
work has received over six hundred citations in scientific literature. 
His
main research area is iterative methods for large systems of linear
algebraic equations and partial differential equations. His code was 
used
in the design of the Swedish Grippen jet fighter, and another code he
co-wrote is part of ANSYS, a major engineering simulation software. His
curent work is on real-time simulation and prediction of nonlinear 
systems
with uncertainty, in particular forest fires. Jan Mandel has started his
computing career with a Russian Minsk-32 and real Teletypes, then
progressed to IBM/360. He still has some old IBM/AIX and SUNs in dark
corners and uses FORTRAN and C at times, but now he does most of his
coding in Matlab.  He has been responsible for departmental computing
since 1988 or so. In 2001, he has configured a Beowulf cluster, and is 
now
supervising its system administration. He does not mind getting his 
hands
dirty when the time allows but draws the line at recompiling Linux
kernels, especially late at night.


Russ Boice Earned BSEET and MSSE degrees while working as an Electronics
Specialist at Colorado State University - Pueblo. He enjoys figuring out
how all kinds of things work and has been fortunate enough to be 
employed
where he has had a chance to pursue this. He has followed the 
advancements
in Computer technology from it's inception. This starting with teletype
machines, through coding in Z80 assembler and currently working with a
bunch of servers for the math department at the University of Colorado,
Denver. He would like to get to the bottom of questions in cosmology. 
One
of his pet peeve is why cosmologists continue to talk about black holes
forming, while knowing this cannot happen.