ABSTRACT

The international polar year was designed to study and better understand the current state of the climatic changes to the world’s ice sheets. For the last few decades, there have been automated weather stations and satellites in geo-synchronous orbit that created data sets. Today, numerous amounts of data are unexplored due to insufficient funding and the scarcity of resources. For this reason, the polar grid concept was proposed to delegate the analysis of the existing data sets.

The goal of the Elizabeth City State University’s Polar Grid Team was to construct a model network to serve as a base for a super computing pool. The super computing pool will be constructed on the university’s campus and linked to the overall polar grid system. Numerous Software and protocols were researched that are currently in use at other institutions around the nation. From the possible protocols, the condor software was chosen. Condor was created and developed at the University of Wisconsin because of easier usage and its willingness for expansion.

An eighteen node computing pool was constructed and tested within Dixon Hall's second floor lab using Condor. This pool was comprised of seventeen desk-tops running on a Windows NT platform, with the pool's mater housed in Lane hall acting as a Linux based server.