Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Can You Spare A Few Trillion Cycles?

Posted by timothy on from the distributing-the-light dept.

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."

3 of 570 comments (clear)

  1. Oh boy... by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Insightful


    He needs networking connection, a decent threading model and doesn't want to crash your box.

    So while he could spend a huge amount of time doing all these basic things in C and still have major risks for the people running it, he has chosen to use the right tool for the job.

    Also the Maths libraries are IEEE compliant in Java and not in C on the PC, so I'm assuming that also played in to his reasoning.

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
  2. Re:Java? by hayds · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Java can actually be quite fast and efficient for number crunching or scientific applications because of the JIT compilers and automatic optimisation. Its only painfully slow when you need a GUI. It also has a great class library so he should be able to do things like the visualisation and the networking for the clients to send the data home relatively easily, whereas it would take a lot longer to write and debug in C.

    Also with Java, he can just offer the JAR file on his site or whatever and people can d/l it and run it. I guess this isnt really important if he's aiming at geeks, but if he's trying to get others to participate, it is handy that people wont need to worry about compiling it themselves or picking the right version (like at the seti@home site).

  3. which would you rather run? by theguywhosaid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    wow, its slower than C. i'd rather run a random java app than a random native app because you can easily sandbox it and know its not going to screw your computer. thats one less barrier to people helping the dude out. and theres no recompile for the various linux platforms, win32, solaris, macOS, etc etc. its certainly slower, but more friendly to the community.