3. The Beginning

From the day we started this course we were told by our professors, Eric Lyons and Nirav Merchant, that in this course we would be doing something meaningful to a group of people who were in desperate need of help. We did not know at this point what we were getting into but we were all on board with the idea of helping people.

We spent the first two months of class working with specific programs that were tied to the course but we were unaware of their real purpose. One after another we were introduced to different software such as Docker, OpenStack, and Makeflow/Workqueue. All three seemed like they could be useful for something but we had yet to be introduced into what that something was. At this point in the class, we saw the potential in using these specific pieces of software but were unable to see how important they were to the work we would soon be doing.

Along with the introduction to new software, we were introduced to FutureGrid and the University of Arizona High Performance Computer (HPC) as tools to assist us in what was coming up. These two systems allowed us to parallelize tasks so that they could run more efficiently. These systems were gifts for us to use during this course.