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Software for Hardware Demonstrations?
raarky asks: "My company will be running a stand at a rather respectable geek conference and I would like to ask the developer and sysadmin crowd what sort of demonstration software would be cool to see running on some of the highend server, workstation and mobility (notebooks, handhelds etc) hardware we have available. Ideally it has to appeal to the intended audience and show off the capabilities of these systems (read: intensive). My first thoughts were something like a renderfarm or some great open source 'end to end solution' that crunches lots of data and has client software to display the results." What software would you use to show off hardware capabilities?
Generally, what gets displayed should *look* cool first, and then if someone from afar comes up to get more info, go ahead and give them all of the geeky specs and such.
When I was in the Air Force, we had an old IBM mainframe with a huge tape silo (like 8 or 10 feet in diameter, 8 feet tall, etc.), and for the main room that got toured by the top brass, we opted for a large window-panel instead of one to store tapes in the six sides. This, of course, took quite a bit of tape storage away. However, the benifit was that those on tour could see the robotic arm moving around at 60 miles an hour inside the silo. We had a program that did nothing but run the arm around, grab random tapes, and swap them in and out of the drives for a minute or two. Completely useless, but it never failed to impress the hell out of them.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Real time raytracing in Quake III?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
have one (or two) systems running a fairly substantial, dynamic website with substantial data munging going on (e.g.: an e-commerce app) and simulate a couple (hundred) thousand customers hitting it. you can get some really neat real-time stats displays going updating in real time (e.g. n-thousand transactions in the past second, n-thousand dollars in transactions over the last set of time frames, etc.)
;-))
other, very sexy demos include: real-time anything, but particularly real-time multi-media. eyecandy is always a good thing. for example, real time recording, transforming, encoding, and writing of video (plus sound) data at high res and framerates, etc.
just my 0.02 euro (which right now is worth more than your $0.02
"I wouldn't go with a renderfarm - people are too used to seeing the 60fps stuff that comes out of hardware acceleration to be THAT impressed by software rendering, even if it looks great at 1 frame every 10 seconds."
Welllll it kind of depends on the target audience. If they're talking about Siggraph, which is coming next month, the people there would get it.
Essentially, I agree, though. I saw an Itanium demo where was rendering a pretty detailed engine. Whoop-de-do, my workstation could top that. I wasn't the slightest bit impressed until the sales guy (as opposed to the video...) used the word 'voxels'. Suddenly that was pretty cool. I had nothing to compare it with. They didn't have a P4 doing the same task next to it.
Which brings me to my next point, the solution I can see is to have it side by side with a typical render farm. "Who will win?" *Shrug* I agree, show me a chart instead of a machine.
"Derp de derp."
Boing Ball
That man tried to kill mah Daddy