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 huh?

[Kris_J]

Give me a client I can run on my (Series 60) mobile phone, just to say that I have, and I'll think about running your apps. Meanwhile, for my PCs I prefer D.Net because of its seriously optimised core -- if I'm going to donate CPU cycles I want to know they're not being wasted by computing overhead. (Usefulness of the project itself aside.)

Re:Java is a slow cruncher

[Lumpy]

These days, processing cycles cheap, programmer time expensive.

Thank you! you exposed the SINGLE reason that software completely sucks today.

This mentality is why games are bloatware, Office suites suck, Operating systems use 2X the resources than the last iteration... (linux kernel excluded as I can remove crud, and linus and the crew are always optimizing that bugger)

Until someone starts smacking people hard who say that the state of general computing will continue to spiral into the toilet.

Gnome 1.X would run fine on a Pentium 233 with 64 meg of ram... today, gnome, KDE and everything else linux is requireing way too much memory and processor to do the same job. and Windows is 2X worse... (Xp is NO DIFFERENT than W2K other than silly eye candy.. yet it is massively slower than 2K...)

Luckily there are exceptions.. the Blender programmers are making things faster and smaller, Mozilla are also striving to that end....