Slashdot Mirror
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?
Show them how you can install a gentoo system in less than 12 hours! C'mon, we all know GCC output gives linux (gentoo) users a hard-on.
(Im a linux user, humor...)
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.
The same applies for most 'data crunching' applications - unless your audience is intimately familiar with how long ( protein folding | SETI searches | whatever you're doing ) takes, it's not going to be that impressive. Even if they do know how long something takes, a speed gain of two over whatever they use is just going to be lost in the hurly burly of the presentation atmosphere, unless you can compare them side-by-side.
That said, it's going to depend on your audience - if they are ALL real 3DSMAX heads, then show one of the default benchmarks running, with nice big printed charts showing the gains over your competition. But if they're a mix of 3DSMAX users and Maya users (for example), then you're going to lose half of them.
Hooray for unfinished comments!
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
You don't want your pcs to break during a demo.
Flashy and without substance is what a demo should be.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
..and just claim that it's a realtime simulation of the universe.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Not Nethack.
Demonstrate retro-compatibility! Yeah, baby!!!! ;-)
-psy
You do not need software to demo hardware. Chances are that the demo software that you use will apeal to the wrong audience. Worst, you will spend more time answering software questions then hardware questions. Make the hardware look cool. Show the guts. If your servers have redundant bits, demo that.
The only software that you will need is operating systems. Sysadmins will want to know if the hardware runs their operating system of choice. If you only support Windows, only demo Windows. If your company is OS agnostic have several OSes installed, possibly in multiboot configurations.
Build a webserver farm connected via a load-balancer to the web with at least a 45 MBit/s line.
On the handhelds (which of course should be having a HiRes display) let the user have a browser which could not access anything beside from your load-balance webserver farm.
On the webserver farm host free (as in beer) pr0n.
Display real time stats and let the user test your setup. They will be happy customer (the sales people being in the front).
Boing Ball
That man tried to kill mah Daddy