Can You Spare A Few Trillion Cycles?

rkeene517 writes "11 years ago I did a simulation of 29 billion photons in a room, that got published at SIGGRAPH 94. The 1994 image, called Photon Soup is here . Now computers are 3000 times faster and I am doing it again only much better, with a smaller aperature, in stereo, with 3 cameras, and with some errors fixed, and in Java. The 1994 image took 100 Sparc Station 1's a month to generate. I need volunteers to run the program for about a month in the background and/or nights. The program is pure Java." Read on for how you can participate in the project.

"The plan is to run the program on a zillion machines for a month and combine the results. All you have to do is run it and when the deadline arrives, email me a compressed file of the cache directory. So email me here and I'll send you the zip file. The deadline will be June 1st 2004.

The running program has a More CPU/Less CPU button. Every half hour it saves the current state of the film. The longer and more machines that run this, the cleaner and sharper the image gets. If you have a lot of machines, I can give instructions how to combine the results so you can send in a single cache directory.

Of course, you will get mention in the article if it gets published."

Comments

Java eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java eh? So it should run at about the same speed now on modern hardware as it did a decade ago? Chortle.

Dude, you should try out China

[alphakappa]

I hear they use cycles big time there. Pretty cheap too comapared to cars.

Hi-quality pr0n

[Compact Dick]

Now ... I am doing it again only much better, with a smaller aperature [sic], in stereo, with 3 cameras ...

The world needs more dedicated releasers like you.

Nah

[AstrumPreliator]

I don't feel like donating a few trillion cycles to produce an image that says "The page cannot be displayed". Possibly if you made it say, "The photons cannot be displayed", I would think about it.

=P

Best time is Winter

[DigiShaman]

The best time for these project is in the Winter time. Because, that's when I have my heater on. And if my CPU is running 100%, then the heat from it will help heat up my appartment rather then the heater needing to kick on.

I mean, I don't mean to belittle this project. But for all grid computing projects, there is a better time and place for this in my opinion.

Re:Photons

[Kelerain]

According to one of my Psych professors, under ideal conditions the human eye can detect a single photon.

For example, when looking at a photon detector.

Use real photons

[Andy_R]

You could cut your rendering time down to about 1/200th sec by employing the following hardware:

old cookie tin
2 marbles
cheap disposable camera and a... ...whatever that blurry thing top right is supposed to be.

The resultant time saving could be usefully employed learing how the gif file format works.