To understand how the cluster supports research at Tufts, the following user comments shows a wide range of applications. If you wish to contribute a short description of your usage, please contact durwood.marshall@tufts.edu or lionel.zupan@tufts.edu.
Umma Rebbapragada
I am a Ph.D. student in computer science, studying machine learning. My research requires me to run experiments in which I test my methods on different data sets. For each data set, I may need to search for or test a particular set of input parameters. For each particular configuration of the experiment, I will need to perform multiple runs in order to ensure my results are statistically significant, or create different samplings of my data. In order to test a wide variety of configurations across multiple data sets, I exploit the cluster's ability to run "embarassingly parallel" jobs. I have submitted up to 2000 jobs at a time, and have them finish within hours. This has allowed me to test new ideas quickly, and accelerated my overall pace of research. I have different software demands depending on the project I'm working on. These include Java, shell, perl, Matlab, R, C and C++. Fortunately, these are all well-supported on the cluster. I also plan to explore MPI one day and take advantage of products like Star-P, which are available on the cluster.
David Bamman and Greg Crane
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