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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 ?"
And save the environment a little bit?
I'd be interested to see how quickly you could fold@home@work on that cluster.
I think that would be an ideal setup to run Vista on. I heard that with SP1 you might only need half of the equipment you currently have.
that it will be fast enough to run Duke Nukem Forever when it gets released.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
"So, what would be the coolest and most far out thing you would do with this kind of hardware?"
Instead of pissing around with stuff that may not go anywhere other than a few giggles over lunch.
Why not just rent, or lend it out to people who don't have the funding or equipment that could use this cluster for a better purpose than "playing around"?
Just saying...
Chess
Poker
Fighter Combat
Guerrilla Engagement
Desert Warefare
Air-to-Ground Actions
Theaterwide Tactical Warfare
Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare
Global Thermonuclear War
??
Write a program that creates every possible 255x255px bitmap possible, and then right an algorithm to go through and figure out which ones are rubbish and which ones are actually recognizable pictures.
Logic dictates that one of the resulting pictures would have to be of John Lennon kicking George W Bush in the nuts, find that picture and post it on failblog.
Voila.
Protein folding really helps us biologists A LOT, so please run it. http://folding.stanford.edu/
There was this one incident when me and this girl turned a cabinet over on it's side and used it as a surface for sex play. That was different. It didn't get weird until she insisted that I tie her wrists with some Cat 5 though.
I'm doing computational condensed matter physics for my PhD. If you give me an account, I can keep your cluster at full load while you're not using it. :) The type of stuff I run can span hundreds of processors over (sorry to say it) slow interconnects like GigE.
If you let me use it, I'll acknowledge you in all publications AND I'll make you some pretty pictures (materials under extreme conditions make for cool figures).
Anyone else think a 2^16 vs. 2^16 Team Fortress game would be pretty cool?
Corollary to Hanlon's razor: Any significantly advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
as some have said, donate the time to people would like to buy it but can't, or on odd days turn up 1000 SETI@home processes and see how far it gets?
Create a reverse Google bomb - Index every link to say 'george bush' from Google, read each page into memory hash the words, assigning value by count amongst all the pages, and then post the top ten words on GW that are not 'the' 'a' 'was' etc.
Perhaps comparing this to the same process on Paris Hilton would be a report that sparks SkyNet to life. I don't know. Seriously, if those two have 6 of the top ten words in common it would have to mean something.
If you have all that cpu sitting idle, that is the kind of weird shit nobody else would do, but also couldn't not read the report either. Perhaps you'll start something new for Google Trends? :)
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I do burn-in testing on a lot of the machines we get at work, using hardware I can't personally afford.
My favorite test is to find scenes to render with a raytracer.. yafray is my favorite, runs on all major platforms. But not just any scene, it has to have all the details turned up to 11, contain extremely high detail (polygon counts drive up memory usage), and write out an absurdly large image.
Kind of whimsical but it's hard to not be impressed by an image 20,000 pixels square with perfectly accurate reflections. Who cares if I can only fit a fraction of it on my monitor. ;)
Rosetta @ home or fold.it
Or you could try to thermally load them in patterns that produced different tones on the fans (or maybe an AM radio) record it then speed it up. Maybe you could make it sound like a baluga whale.
Or maybe you could implement a virtual machine cluster of 250 cores. The repeat the process till you see how many virtual machines you can stack on top of each other till it has the same speed as a single processor.
While this might sound stupid this would give us a rough estimate of how many watts per virtual world it takes and from that we could figure out how many layers deep in the simulation we actually live assuming the top level one is powered by something less than 1 sol of power.
or work out all possible moves in N-space tic-tac-toe. The only smart move is not to play.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I (Mat) work at Vanderbilt University's supercomputing center. Our university supercomputing center was originally a joint venture between the proteomics and high-energy physics departments, but they decided to make it a independent university-wide initiative to bring HPC tools to all users.
Before we founded the center, there were a lot of groups that required computing on campus, but it was highly inefficient. Their local clusters had lots of free cycles (low return on asset) that they couldn't effectively share with other users, the clusters were down quite often (grad students and postdocs are poor sysadmins, plus they should be doing actual research anyway). Several other problems related to either pooling of resources or pooling of knowledge, you get the idea...
I highly recommend setting up a batch scheduler such as Torque/Maui and opening your cluster to all researchers on campus. You'd be surprised how much demand is out there. We have all the usual math/science/engineering/biomedical users, plus users in more esoteric fields (nursing, accounting, music, psychology). You can always give your group a higher job priority if needed. It gives a higher return on asset and gets lots of goodwill on campus (and, potentially, at funding agencies). You can charge users for support, storage, etc for cost recovery, or even use it as a revenue source if your grants allow.
Having different types of users also allows cross-pollination of ideas. We have a large number of biomedical researchers who are now using a high-energy physics software (geant), biomedial people who are teaching other users how to program in R, etc. These are avenues for research/discovery that didn't exist before.
xkcd Network
Instead of randomly generating pictures or something as someone suggested above, why not make it generate say a 64k program, keep iterating through this until you get an executable that will actually RUN (Without crashing) and see what happens.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Uh. So the endless Beowulf jokes are funny to you, but the nowhere near as long running Vista ones aren't? You perhaps should go into therapy to resolve your Vista issues. I'm intrigued as to why you consider it better than XP in any way.. apart from apparently the calendar is more comprehensive than XP for tracking changes in our date system over the last while.. but other than that. I honestly don't see the benefits. I'm not being hypocritical either - I was doing fine with 98 until games started requiring XP. And I'm writing this on OS X.
which is totally what she said
Prize money in the $100K and up ranges are available for primes that are found above 10 million digits. If you can get the cluster to search for a 10 million digit prime and you end up finding it, you'd earn your Department a cool $100,000 in extra funding. I haven't read the exact rules for the Prime95 program invlovement, but you'd still get a good grant for your Dept. from just crunching 1s and 0s on your idle processes.
Couldn't you be doing something yourself to save the environment right now - something like turning off YOUR computer instead of browsing slashdot? Oh, wait - that would require YOU to do something. That kind of environmental activism is never as much fun as simply preaching to other people what THEY should be doing. Hypocrisy is SO much fun - carry on!
A variant on the rendering theme: Instead of simulating rays, simulate light wavelets and the modern theory of light. You should have enough compute power there to render reasonable scenes using such a technique.
Fluid dynamics: This is a popular one, and NASA offer source codes for free for subsonic, supersonic and even hypersonic flows. In fact, they offer quite a number of subsonic ones. They're also not the only source. There's several open-source CFD packages, ranging from river simulations to aircraft simulations.
Supernovae simulation: There are packages (freeish, rather restricted in access) that allow you to simulate thermonuclear and supernovae explosions within stars. The restrictions are for rather obvious reasons, even though the odds of anyone nasty obtaining a star is, well, unlikely.
COLOSSUS: There are still a couple of ENIGMA ciphers that have never been broken, which can be obtained along with the algorithm Colossus used in World War II to crack such codes. You could complete the set and maybe discover some lost secret (yeah, right).
BLAST: Other posters have suggested renting out the computer time, but that just transfers the problem of what to run, rather than solving it. BLAST, or one of the MPI-based variants thereof, is an exceedingly popular tool for examining nucleotide sequences, but as the databases grow ever-larger, the demand for ever-more information also increases, creating a need for significant compute power to produce the volume of results desired.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You must be new here (I guess this one also qualifies as a classic)