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."