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NetBSD Runs a Marathon

Posted by michael on from the boy-are-its-inodes-tired dept.

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."

3 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Heh. by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 3
    The teaser for this article fails to mention that the NFS server ran Solaris 2.6.

    - A.P.

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  2. Re:A Marathon? by hubertf · · Score: 3

    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

  3. What I would have liked when I ran my first 10K by ackthpt · · Score: 3
    Last year I finished, probably about 3000th, but heard there were photos of each runner available at the finish. Reality was a bunch of photographers taking wide angle shots and offering to crop out a picture of each runner. With my luck it would be one of those "horror" shots like they tabloids like to use along side bad-news-for-this-person headlines. Run 10K, feel fine, cross the line in a sprint and all I'd have to show for it would be some expression like I'm trying to inhale a booger.

    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!

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