Muncc 2

Muncc Information

Muncc 2 is a Beowulf cluster built and maintained by members of the Marmion Academy Technology Club.

"Muncc" is an acronym for Multiple Node Computing Cluster. This is the second iteration of Muncc, the original cluster, Muncc 1, was an Appleseed cluster of PowerMacs. The original system administrator was Nick Charipar '03, now an Electrical Engineering student graduate of Purdue University. Dr. Victor Pinks (pictured, with Dr. Robert Wilson) has been behind each of these clusters. The current system administrator is Scott Rome and David Iozzo

The acronym "Muncc" was chosen to name the cluster in honor of the Benedictine monks of Marmion Abbey, Aurora, IL, who own and operate Marmion Academy, which in turn, owns and operates the Muncc project. The unofficial Muncc mascot (which can be seen in the top-left corner of the picture) consists of Tux, the Linux penguin, wearing part of a monk's habit. As part of his assignments for the Marmion Introduction to Art class in his freshmen year, Conor McDonnell '08 has created a ceramic Tux to complement our stuffed sample.

Muncc 2 is an Intel based Beowulf cluster of 10 nodes. Also utilized by Muncc are a dedicated web server and mail server. An iMac running Apple Macintosh OS X is available to the cluster to provide a graphic user interface (GUI) which will be developed with AppleScript Studio similar to the work of Dr. Craig Hunter at NASA Langley. He has offered us starter code to get a nice GUI and suggests that we use Aquaterm for dynamic data plotting. We will also be using VMD, a molecular visualization program for displaying, animating, and analyzing molecular systems using 3-D graphics and built-in scripting. VMD is distributed free of charge. It was developed and is maintained by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign which is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other federal and private agencies.

This project also includes a multimedia element. We intend to implement a version of POV Ray to ray trace some of the 3D CAD objects created here at Marmion. We hope to extend this to animations produced by students.

For more detailed information on the hardware and software that make up Muncc, visit the Muncc Specifications page.