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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."

12 of 570 comments (clear)

  1. WOOHOO!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    OMFG!!! FLCL is coming back to cartoon network!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! Furi Kuri!!!!!

  2. The question is,, by The+Slashdotted · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    can you spare a few terabytes of bandwidth?

  3. first!!!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    insightful, yes?

  4. Slashdotted already? by InternationalCow · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I can't seem to connect to the server. Maybe a time-warped slashdot effect (considering the freshness of the post at this time, it MUST be something like that) has caused the server to be down. Apart from that, I think participating should be fun. A client written in Java is a good idea, as the OS you use is not important in that case. Too many distributed computing projects are being hampered by having Windows-only clients.

    --
    ----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
  5. Mod me off-topic by Merovign · · Score: 0, Offtopic


    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!

    ?

    1. Re:Mod me off-topic by richie2000 · · Score: -1, Offtopic
      What is it with the moderators today?!?!

      The Microsoft astroturfer's pay checks bounced and they're running amok, not knowing what to think anymore.

      --
      Money for nothing, pix for free
  6. Re:Java can be faster then C sometimes by Arae · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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.

  7. Re:Java huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I'll bet it keeps your dick warm in winter just sitting there in your pocket!

  8. finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    first post - W0000t!

  9. Re:Real URL to image by julesh · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    For a little anti-slashdot-effect help, I've stuck this in my gnutella shared folder.

    Gnutella & G2 users Click here; ED2K users here.

  10. Re:Java? No wonder you need cpu cycles. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    What's up moderators? Insightful?

    > I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for this post
    This in fact should get modded flaimbait or troll.

    > Interpreting bytecode ...
    Did you hear about just-in-time compilers?

    > Then of course there is the speed issue.
    Java is in many cases faster than C++.

  11. Re:Java eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    This post is open source, retransmit as desired.

    +4 AC troll? Congratulations!