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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 ?"
Most researchers have to fight tooth and nail to get funding, or even access to, that kind of hardware. You get it without even a plan to use it? Send it back. Save your sponsor's money.
Convert from Java to Fortran (or C++) and your code will run an order of magnitude faster. I bet you can do even better than that. Seriously. You are wasting so much CPU time with Java. This way you can reduce the size of your cluster and save lots of money. Probably taxpayer dollars right? You have some responsibility to the funding agencies.
Common sense such as yours isn't appreciated in discussions like these on slashdot...
What are you talking about? There are plenty of right-wing wankers like you two on Slashdot, convinced that your own bigotry is common sense. Just look at the modding you got.
Part of right-wing insanity is a massive dose of paranoia and an extensive victim complex.
You are going to be meta-moderated. Stop modding people as trolls just because you don't like what you read.
From java to assembler would be more like 200000% extra performance.
Instead of buying a cluster to run Java on, I think they'd get better results with a little less hardware and a competent programmer. But then they wouldn't make the headlines.
But if you ask me (nobody did, I know), buying a HPC and then having to ask if someone knows something cool to do with it is... I've got no words to describe it.