Pools of Virtual Boxes (POVB)

Marquette, like many universities, has hundreds of computers in academic labs, the library, research labs, and on desktops. These computers are often idle throughout various parts of the day, using electricity while not performing useful work. Rather than waste these resources, they can be turned into powerful research tools if configured appropriately.

Drs. Craig Struble and Lars Olson with the help of biomedical engineering undergraduate David Herzfeld have created Pools of Virtual Boxes to utilize Marquette's idle resources. Built on Condor and VirtualBox, idle Windows machines in labs run Linux and provide computational cycles for researchers across campus. These cycles are used to assist in drug discovery, MRI image analysis, genetic analyses, and many other projects.

The software is open source and available from Sourceforge

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Campus Grids

Campus grids link together computing resources at an institution to support research and collaboration. A goal of campus grids is to provide a seamless workflow from data collection to analysis and dissemination of results. The campus grid is an essential component of discovery in the 21st Century. Read the Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery report for more details.