The College of Engineering, seeking to streamline and establish more consistency in the purchase and management of Beowulf-class high-performance computing clusters, has established a joint-funded position in conjunction with UD Network and Systems Services. My name is Jeffrey Frey (call me Jeff) and I have the honor of doing my best to fill this position. My PhD work for Dr. Douglas Doren in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry here at the University included:

• Quantum-chemical calculations in Gaussian and WIEN
• Setup and maintenance of an 11 node AMD Opteron Beowulf cluster
• Code development:
  • TubeGen, a carbon nanotube structure generator
  • A minimal, generalized Gaussian basis set code library in C
  • STIGMA [Scanning Tunneling Imaging by Gaussian Molecular orbital Analysis] software for the calculation and visualization of ab initio STM images
  • Software library and utilities for non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) treatment of molecular conductance, using DFT wave functions from Gaussian

The following list enumerates the proposed duties that I will have as Cluster Manager for the College of Engineering. This list may expand or contract as both I and you, the faculty and staff of the College, figure out just what constitutes my job description.

• Provide a degree of continuity in system administration and maintenance.

  This does not preclude the involvement of undergraduate/graduate students in the routine tasks involved with keeping a cluster up and running; this will be left to the discretion of the individual research groups.

• Diagnose and/or deal with hardware and software problems.

  Since clusters will be housed at 192 Chapel St. it is not feasible for students/p.i.'s to perform hardware maintenance. Though users should be familiar with their computational packages, it may not be the best use of their time to be an expert in OS-level software maintenance/debugging.

• Provide advice on the purchase and maintenance of clusters.

  This may include negotiating with hardware/software vendors, evangelizing existing cluster capabilites, and facilitating tests of existing clusters' capabilities by faculty seeking to purchase a new cluster.

• Establish a “user group” and provide training.
• Email list-servs will be created for various aspects of clustering:
  1. An administrative list populated by p.i.’s and NSS staff for maintenance announcements, etc.
  2. Discussion lists for users of commerical programs in the College
  3. Developer discussion lists for programming aid
• In addition, meetings/classes will be designed for the express purpose of introducing new users to the Linux environment; introducing users to software packages; and providing development training in alternate languages and parallel programming practices.