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.
David Bamman and Greg Crane
We use the cluster now for two main purposes: parallel text alignment
(aligning all of the words in a Latin or Greek text like the /Aeneid/ or
the /Odyssey/ with all of the words in its English translation) and
training probabilistic syntactic parsers on our treebank data. Both of
these are computationally expensive processes - even aligning 1M words
of Greek and English takes about 8 hours on a single-core desktop, and
for my end result, I need to do this 4 separate times. Using a
multithreaded version of the algorithm (to take advantage of each
cluster computer's 8 cores) has let me scale up the data to quantities
(5M words) that I simply could not have done on our existing desktop
computers. Most importantly, though, the cluster environment lets me
run multiple instances of these algorithms in parallel, which has
greatly helped in testing optimization parameters for both tasks, and
for the alignment task in particular lets me run those 4 alignments
simultaneously - essentially letting me work not just faster but more
accurately as well.
Luis Dorfmann
Evaluating patient-specific Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm wall stress based on flow-induced loading
...