One of MRSEC's first entries into the realm of computational physics was a cluster we constructed around 2003 called pondermatic. It ran the now-defunct OpenMosix system for farming out tasks across a Linux cluster. The hardware consisted of twenty Athlon 700MHz towers, a head node, an NFS server, and an OpenBSD firewall machine. For about three years, it was the main means for MRSEC researchers to get simulations run.

Of course, with computers progressing at the rate that they do, it wasn't long before those twenty Athlon 700MHz machines seemed like twenty sliderules, and the cluster was soon assessed as using more resources in heat and electricity than its computational output was worth. Some of the machines which were once its nodes ended up becoming small servers for the department, such as our former incarnations of the LDAP and print servers, since those do not require a lot of computational power.

More lately, as the hardware technology progressed, it was starting to become common seeing computers being sold with eight cores/processors and gigabytes of memory -- single computers that had more computational power than the entire pondermatic cluster once had from twenty machines. There was then some intent to build a serious cluster to replace pondermatic, but it never happened. So since there was no actual cluster emerging to replace it, we simply replaced it with exactly such a single 8-core SMP computer. Thus, pondermatic is now just a single computer with 16GB of memory, 1TB disk and 8 processors. Even that's starting to look hokey now.

Access to pondermatic is allowed for anyone in JFI, using your JFI login; however, since home directories are local there and do not come from NFS mounts of jfihome, new users must request creation of a home directory (for now). Your regular JFI home directory is available under /nfs/jfihome, but pondermatic's /home is the local raid disk on pondermatic itself.

For more information on MRSEC, see their site here.