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Projects For When You Have Too Much Computing Power?
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?
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.