June 23, 2004

Computers Go Solo On The Night Shift At Boise State

By Bill Schnupp, intern, Boise State communications and marketing   graphics by Ben Wilson - click for full size view The lights go out, everyone leaves the office, and the computers shut down for the night. That’s the routine for most college campuses and offices nationwide. But at the College of Engineering at Boise State University, classroom computers snap into action and work all night. Free from the daytime demands of human users, the computers pool their brainpower to run complex programs, thereby saving the university the expense of a costly super computer. This may sound like a scene from an animated movie where the appliances and electronic devices come to life when their owners are out of sight. In reality it’s an actual computer grid, implemented by electrical engineering professor Elisa Barney Smith and network administrator Angus McDonald. Rather than sitting idly in sleep mode all night, the 78 computers that currently make up the grid, called Condor, work in concert running various problems and tests.   “Think of it as a task in which an office manager divides up work among the office staff,” says McDonald, who supervises Boise State’s Condor system. “When the staff is finished, the manager collects the various parts and compiles them into a single finished product.” Barney Smith’s mathematically intensive analysis for her research on optical character recognition (OCR) systems provides an example of Condor’s application. She and her team are studying how the characters in documents are degraded by photocopying, faxing and other reproduction methods. Degradation such as rounded corners or slight blurring can make it difficult for OCR systems to correctly recognize characters and convert them to digital form, a process that’s essential for accurately archiving all kinds of records, from government documents to medical research. Barney Smith’s team is developing computer models to predict degraded characters and identify them more accurately. Each round of testing requires about 200 hours of computer computations. Enter Condor. Rather than spend 200 hours running on a single computer, the Condor grid subdivides the analyses and cuts the time down to four to 20 hours, depending on the availability of computers in the grid. Condor has also benefited Boise State financially. In an era of budget restraints, Condor is a creative way to maximize use of capital equipment. Funding that could have been used to purchase a super computer with Condor’s capacity was made available for other projects. Condor operates without anyone on site to supervise it. Once a project is initiated, the grid runs it through to completion automatically. If someone needs to use one of the computers for another reason, that portion of the job is redirected to another computer in the grid. Condor evolved from a system first developed in 1988 by a University of Wisconsin team of software engineers, headed up by computer science professor Miron Livny. The Condor concept was brought to Boise State by Barney Smith. Last year she attended an Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers seminar where Brooklin Gore of Micron Technology described how Micron implemented a Condor grid with 200 computers to perform analytical computations and run manufacturing reports. Barney Smith, computer science professor Tim Andersen and mechanical engineering professor Paul Dawson proposed a similar grid at Boise State. McDonald had the grid up and running by fall. “The nice thing about the Condor grid is that we can always add more computers to it,” says McDonald. If a particular problem is one that can benefit from subdividing and distributing computing power, Condor can be upgraded by adding more computers. In the future, designated computers in labs across campus could become part of one big grid, says McDonald. His vision is not far away. Other departments on campus are planning to join the Condor grid in the very near future. -30- Contact Elisa Barney Smith College of Engineering 208 426-2214 ebarneysmith@boisestate.edu Media contact Pat Pyke communications and marketing 208 426-1987 ppyke@boisestate.edu