September 16, 2019

‘BigDawg’ supercomputer workshop is Friday

A workshop for researchers using “R,” a programming language designed specifically for statistics, is set for Friday. 

This session will show users how “R” can be used with “BigDawg,” the university’s high-performance computing cluster, more commonly known as the university’s supercomputer. 

All SIU faculty who are conducting heavy computational research have access to BigDawg’s extreme computational power and may want to attend to learn more about BigDawg and its uses. 

The free workshop is at 3 p.m. in Wham Building, Room 228. This is a bring-your-own laptop workshop session for those who are interested in walking through the process. Those who are without a laptop are also invited to listen and learn. 

Pre-registration is preferred. Contact Lisa Threlkeld at lthrelk@siu.edu or 618/453-2699 to reserve your spot. 

Last year, the Office of Information Technology worked on several upgrades to increase BigDawg’s power and capabilities. A recent doctoral graduate in qualitative methods used 24,000 CPU hours on BigDawg in 31 days – a huge computational load. Her ability to run the project on a high-performance commuting cluster like Big Dawg enabled her to complete her research and graduate. The volume of calculations she used would have taken more than 1,000 days on an average device.