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Cluster Cracks Jupiter's Moons

Posted by michael on from the virtual-orrery dept.

YourHero writes: "Using the 256-cpu/500MHz Velocity I Cluster (64 Dell PowerEdge boxes installed Aug 1999) Cornell researchers have explained some of the wild moon orbits around Jupiter by running a 1-billion-year simulation. Abstract , abstract (presented at AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences), and news coverage [spaceflight now]. I saw no information on run time, but Aug 1999-present represents an upper limit somewhat short of 1 billion years."

2 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yea but... by caffeinated_bunsen · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I wonder how much of the cluster's processor time is wasted on the overhead for 64 copies of Win2k. It can't be that much, but I'd imagine a more efficient OS could speed things up a bit.

    Anyways, did the simulator simply match reality here? Or was there something more to this?

    The simulator provided an explanation of an odd aspect of reality, namely, that no small moons with eccentric orbits could be found in a certain large range of orbits around Jupiter.

    --

    Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
  2. Cornell's Velocity Cluster by QuantumFTL · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm an undergrad at Cornell, currently assisting with some magnetohydronamics research (Parallelizing a FORTRAN program written by a bunch of russian scientists... yay...). I'll probably be using the cluster at the end of the year, and I must say I'm rather impressed with it. It's not as cool as some that Cornell has had in the past, however they are very willing to let many individuals use it, and I find it great that I get to be involved with supercomputing at an undergraduate level. (Some day I hope to be a computational physicist).

    Also, slightly off topic, I've been hired to create and install/maintain a linux cluster of 6 linux boxes connected with 100 base-T Eithernet, and I have about $3500 to spend for it. Anyone have any suggestions about what to use? I'm thinking 1.3-1.4 GHZ Athelon processors, a small drive, 256-512 megs of ram...

    Also, can anyone tell me why using Red Hat would be a bad idea... it'll just be running FORTRAN programs non-stop, with a bit of SSH and SCP, nothing kernel-intensive. In the Space Sciences Building where I work, we use Red Hat and Solaris, and I don't really see much point using a "better" distribution, like Debian (as I have never really used it much before).

    Cheers,
    Justin