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NetBSD Runs a Marathon
hubertf writes: "Last weekend, R-KOM and the University of Applied Science
(Fachhochschule, FH) Regensburg, Germany, took their share of the
Regensburg city marathon by putting a video and image of each runner
reaching the goal on the Internet. A cluster of 45 machines from the
Fachhochschule Regensburg, each running the NetBSD operating system
computed over five thousand films. The cluster machines were operating on a common NFS storage, performing two steps. First, the video stream provided in MPEG format was split into single pictures, then a six seconds long movie was assembled for each runner reaching the goal, showing his personal run through the goal. Overall computing time was about 20h in which the five hours of video material was split into 670.000 images, that were then re-assembled into 5500 MPEG streams of about 1 megabyte each. A short
english-language description of the Marathon Cluster is
available, and there's also a
german
language version which has many details on the setup and operation of the cluster."
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Heh - when they did this for people entering and leaving the Superbowl, it was pure evil in the eyes of many Slashdotters...
Still, it's a neat trick.
--
the telephone rings / problem between screen and chair / thoughts of homocide
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
1: The more informative text was in german (which I cant read...) yet the illustrations were in english?
2: I dont know about the rest of you - but any mpeg encoding I've done that has taken chopping, decreased size, added logos and taken any stills takes quite a while on one machine - this cluster did A LOT in a short amount of time! Nonetheless they added the runner name and time on the pictures (and in the movie?) using, i assume, the transponders they equip at races now.
This is neat. Good usage of technologies to automatically do some stuff that would take humans forever to do by hand!
--onyx--
I ran my first marathon last year, and I thought chip timing was really cutting edge! =)
Seriously, I don't think that I would have wanted my picture taken when I finished; I was crying with relief!
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
(Oh, wait...it will...)
Got Rhinos?
Good point - if we get to do this again, I'll ask Sun for a fully-stuffed E10k to do the job. :)
;/
(AFTER we got the software running on Solaris, which flaked out on us on Solarix 8/x86...)
Oh, and try to get some decent video material.
- Hubert
Probably not. By what I understand, Beowulf provides some special ways for communication between nodes.
What we used was just plain services available on every Unix system - rsh and NFS.
- Hubert
Actually, we had SDL.
The software used in the first step of the cluster - splitting up the MPEG stream into single pictures. We used a customized version of dumpmpeg, which uses smpeg and SDL.
For the second part, we used mpeg_encode to create the 5500 MPEGs from the 660.000 JPEGs.
- Hubert
*BSD on the frontpage twice in twenty-four hours? Where are the real /. editors, and who the hell are you?
Simpler solution(?): An MPEG encoder (and a pair of Betacam machines running time of day TC for backup), a RIAD array, and the ChampionChip system would work just fine given a 24 hour turnaround time.
The time on the chip is translated to a frame number which is Mediacleaned out and mailed via a bot.
I don't see why it should take 45 machines...
I hope this stuff gets around, it would be nice in a couple years to be able to put on a website and email URL to friends and family.
It may look like I'm trying to hoork a loogie, but this was my best finishing time, yet!
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Mandatory karma whoring using Bablefish
Translated German Version
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
People are sick and tired of your cut & paste troll about BSD. Why do your panties get in a twist every time an article mentions BSD? Did you lose your janitorial job at Walnut Creek or BSDi? Was your wife screwing a FreeBSD developper? Let's be realistic here: You either use *BSD or you don't. If you don't use it, why do you care that much about it?
You've been posting this same illogical, cut & paste troll for the last year and *BSD is still alive and kicking. Did it ever occur to you that the number of posts on Usenet might not directly correlate to OS popularity? Get a life.