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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."
What is it with the moderators today?!?!
People are posting things like "gee this is a great idea" and getting modded as a Troll, people are
posting simple and obvious and funny jokes and being modded as Flamebait!
?
The parent has no idea what he's talking about, and needs to be modded down.
The generated code is not what makes Java slow; and given the example from parent's post, a c compiler (e.g. gcc) can also make the same optmization as a Java Virtual Machine and compiler.
What makes Java slow is the transition from bytecode to machine binary code: it takes time to translate and optimizes codes on the fly. This might be a moot point for some program, but there is also another reason why Java is slower: its garbage collector. Because of it, Java programs are guranteed to run at least 5% slower than C programs.