Pooch in Use Pooch is in use at a variety of illustrious institutions (in no particular order): the United States Geological Survey, the Biological Engineering Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Advanced Photon Source experiment at the Argonne National Laboratory, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Membrane Simulation Group at the Illinois Institute of Technology, MGM Las Vegas hotels, the Department of Plant Biology at Michigan State University, the Science and Technology Education Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, the Department of Biology at the University of Rochester, the Department of Physics at Swarthmore College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Plasma Physics at the Naval Research Laboratory, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD, the Department of Land, Air, and Water at University of California, Davis, and elsewhere.

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"One of the best pieces of software on the Mac platform. I'm continually increasingly impressed. It's a really simply beautiful piece of work." - Professor Noah W. Allen, Deptartment of Chemistry, University of North Carolina Asheville

Featured Users

MrBayes: Bayesian Inference of Phylogeny Professor John Huelsenbeck of U. C. San Diego and Professor Fredrik Ronquist of Uppsala University wrote and made available a program named MrBayes. The program is named for Thomas Bayes because of his theories about probability and, in this case, their application to biology. pMrBayes is a parallel application that performs Bayesian estimates of phylogeny. The program uses Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation technique to approximate the posterior probability distribution of trees. The group was able to apply easy-to-use parallel computing to biology.

 

The Bifrost Cluster At Berry College, Dr. Todd Timberlake of the Department of Physics and his colleagues created the Bifrost Cluster. Their research involving the cluster is initially focused on Quantum Chaos, but they intend to grow its application to a variety of other projects. They recently had the opportunity to incorporate an additional 25 iMacs into his cluster. They were able to achieve over 74 Gigaflops of computing power using their system.

 

Boccio Galaxy-Galaxy Collision Simulations At the Physics Department of Swarthmore College, Dr. John R. Boccio and Daniel Reinganum, a sophomore physics major, wrote a parallel tree code to simulate galaxy-galaxy collision simulations using his Mac cluster running Pooch. Written using Absoft's Fortran 95 compiler, their code modeled a variety of cases of galaxy evolution. The have posted a series of QuickTime movies and other images on their research web site. A description of their project in PDF is available.

 

Child's First Flight Planetarium Animation Awarded second place in the world's first Full Dome Animation Festival held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At Northern Kentucky University, Dan Spence and his colleagues in the Physics and Geology Department created an animation called Child's First Flight for their planetarium. They used a Mac cluster with Pooch to generate 3900 frames and full 5.1 digital surround sound for the 2 minute 10 second presentation. The animation begins with a balsa wood plane flying through a chess set and continues with a fly-over of a "space plane" with a startling sonic boom followed by a starry sky then ends with the sound of crickets and his dreams bringing the audience back to Earth.

 

Kenny's Cluster From Dean Dauger: In June 2001, I received an email from a fellow named Kenny. Kenny was asking about using Pooch to run his cluster of five iMacs but had encountered a little trouble. The next day he emailed again saying he figured out the problem and that, after he remembered to set a few toggle switches, all was well. I emailed to tell him I was glad that he got it all working, and I asked him about what he was doing with the cluster, who was he, and where was he. To my surprise, Kenny's reply was that he was in Hawaii, and that he was in the sixth grade. His name is Kenny Holloway. At the time, he attended Wheeler Middle school and lived on the island of Oaho. He built the cluster for his GT Technology class. Later, Kenny was kind enough to give me permission to tell his story and provide the above picture of him (on the left), his cluster, and Mr. Fujiyama (on the right), the school's Tech Coordinator who helped him gather the supplies. We are proud to say we hit a new "low" with this one.