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Projects For When You Have Too Much Computing Power?

Posted by Cliff on from the fun-things-to-do-with-your-spare-hardware dept.

Spackler asks: "Recently, I completed a consulting gig that I needed to pick up 5 fast machines for a data conversion. Now that the conversion is complete, I have all this hardware, and nothing to compute. I know I could toss them together as a Beowulf cluster, but the big question is, what types of things do I compute on them? I know distributed.net, or Seti@home, or GIMPS would like them just added in, but are there any cool off the shelf things that need a ton of power, and take a long time to process, that can be done on a normal cluster? Some odd (but easy to understand) math question? Something cooler than brute force encryption breaking?" We've already had a discussion on some of the more well known distributed projects already, what are more home grown projects that one can use a cluster for?

5 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Donations by sharkey · · Score: 2

    I am accepting donations at this time. My wife wishes to get and use AOL 6.0. Obviously I need something that has the horsepower to deal with the popup ads, spam, and oh-so-easy-to-useness AOL, since it's obvious why it's number 1.

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    "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
  2. GRASS by sohp · · Score: 2
    Take a look at the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System GIS. From the home page: an open source Geographical Information System (GIS) with raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphics production functionality that operates on various platforms through a graphical user interface and shell in X-Windows. It is released under GNU General Public License (GPL).

    Get yourself a GPS and start mapping your favorite haunts, generate MPG animations of your travels.

    Hey if you don't find a use for all 5 of those machines I might have room in my study for one

  3. Break codes by milgram · · Score: 2

    I lost my Win95 password. Could you break it for me? :)

  4. povray rendering farm by esonik · · Score: 2

    Set up a public povray server to allow people to render ray tracing/radiosity pictures. (This idea is not new, such a thing already exists.) This would require some dedication, however. As an alternative, you could join an already existing rendering farm.

  5. simulate weather/climate systems by dutky · · Score: 4

    About the time I got my first K6-3D box, and was considering an early Athlon box, I looked into weather simulation programs as a fun thing to run in order to use up all the excess CPU cycles I now had. A number of different packages exist that will produce interesting results, though I don't know how easily they can be made to compile and run on Linux (the problem is finding a good Fortran compiler): NCAR/Pennstate mesoscale model MM5, NCAR Community Climate Model CCM3, and Colorado State RAMS model.