Most supercomputers are so big, that they fill warehouses. The one built by computer science students at Southern Methodist University fits on the edge of a desk.
"So this is the NVIDIA Jetson Cluster. So it's 16 NVIDIA Jetsons, which are single board computers," SMU Research and Data Sciences Team Lead Dr. Eric Godat said. "In layman's terms, this is a supercomputer."
Most people never lay eyes on a supercomputer because they are warehoused under high security.
"When you think supercomputer you think, 'Oh, I'm never going to get to use one of those or see one,'" Godat said. "Well, it's really kind of the same components you have in your normal computer. It's just a lot of them all talking to each other."
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While not nearly as powerful as its supersized counterparts, SMU's baby supercomputer has the power to help teach.
"It's not just students; we also have faculty and staff who have never seen a supercomputer," Godat said. "So the real value of this is we can set it on a desk, we can point, 'OK, this is connected to this one.'"
"It's definitely a great learning tool," SMU computer science senior student Conner Ozenne said. "Being able to see a cluster, know how it works, and kind of experimentation; it's like these are super finicky things."
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Ozenne got the idea to build the supercomputer. The work was done in a lab tucked in the corner of a third-floor library. It took many tweaks, trials and errors to get the final product.
"Probably mostly shock," Ozenne said of his reaction when it worked. "Just kinda glad that I hadn't started a fire."
His work can help spark other students' interest in the field. Supercomputers have practical applications in the growing world of artificial intelligence.
"If you get more people interested in it from an approachable level of supercomputing, and with its applications and A.I. machine learning, you get more people that can go into that field in the future," Ozenne said.
SMU will show its baby supercomputer at a supercomputing conference in Dallas this year.
