Slashdot Mirror
Cool/Weird Stuff To Do On a Cluster?
Gori writes "I'm a researcher at a university. Our group mainly does Agent Based Modeling of interdisciplinary problems (think massive simulations where technology, policy, and economics meet). Recently, we managed to get a bunch of money for a High Performance Cluster to run our stuff on. The code is mostly written in Java. Our IT support people are very capable of setting up a stable cluster that will run Java perfectly. But where's the fun in that? What I'm trying to figure out are other, more far-out and interesting things to do with this machine — think 500+ Opteron cores, 2 GB RAM per core, a gigabit interconnect with some badass switches, a massive storage array, plus a bunch of UltraSPARC boxes. So at times when there's no stuff to crunch, I'd like to boot the thing up with a 'weird' system image and geek around in the name of science. Try fancy ways of building models, dynamically adding all sorts of hardware to it, etc. Have different schedulers compete for resources. Imagine a Matlab vs. Boinc vs. ProActive shootout. Maybe run plan9 on it? Most of us are not CE/CS people, but we are geeky enough. So, what would be the coolest and most far out thing you would do with this kind of hardware ?"
Well, you could try something that no modern computer has been able to achieve, and they think it'll take something on the order of Deep Thought to get it done -- run Windows Vista at a reasonable speed.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
...they might have a person or two who might know what to do with it I'm sure.
HAD
If you are not using it for something useful, why don't you shut it down, go to minimal power consumption and stop wasting energy?
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Play first person shooters and download way too much porn. You should find yourself fitting right in.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Not to mention all of the copyrights you would violate.