Over the past year, the Advanced Reactor Design Simulation group at the University of Dhaka (DU-ARDS) has increased its activity in academic research. However, a predominant constraint has been the limited processing power accessible to our researchers and students. Although funding is available for establishing classroom computing facilities, it falls short of provisioning high-performance computing infrastructure for academic research. As such, we initiated a project aimed at evaluating the feasibility of repurposing existing computing resources into a computing cluster. The current phase of this initiative involves a preliminary exploration, where we have implemented a prototype using four barebone computers configured as a Beowulf cluster. This setup is then used to demonstrate nuclear data processing and Monte Carlo particle transport simulation with different parallelism strategies. The objective is to incrementally scale this model, initially extending to ten barebone computers and transitioning to enterprise-grade servers. Preliminary results from this phase are promising, substantiating the planned expansion and further development of the project.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Islam et al. (2024) studied this question.