If you're going for Boost, you're diving into a sea of angry template-metaprogramming. What's seriously needed in the world of mathy software is more really good computational geometry packages. What doesn't exist right now (to my knowledge) is an open source implementation of M. Held's algorithm for generating generalized voronoi diagrams from poly-line curves (arcs and lines). Open source manufacturing is picking up and the algorithms to actually take the level sets, generate toolpaths, and all this are just starting to bubble up. This would be an excellent domain for an applied mathematician to dive into. Just make sure to try and get someone to watch over your shoulder to make sure the API is nice.
I really hate to say it, but basic on micro controllers has been done way way way too much. I think it would be far more appealing if you could write a small JVM for it (pretty easy), or have the user write their programs in C where the firmware serves as kind of a network bootloader, and you release the tcp stack and web server stuff as a library.
I've been working at fairly big tech companies since I was 14 and haven't had a problem. If they need you, they hire you. Google was just being really, really assholic in this case.
I go to summit prep, and I know a ton of the students that went to HTH. It was pretty much a complete failure. Students thought the school was a complete joke, I didn't really talk to them much about how, but the jist of it was that nobody really did any real work. Summit on the other hand is doing great things, don't think that just because 'prep' is in the name that all the students are privileged. Most aren't. Many came from really tough backgrounds, and the principal is doing some pretty great things, and the teachers really seem to care that their students are learning and are retaining the information. Keep in mind it is a charter school, not a private school. So it's basically just a public school that's getting onto it's feet.
What do you want to DO with it? To get one thing straight, beowulf is a distribution, and bproc/mosix/lam/mpich are ways of getting apps to communicate over a cluster. What technology you use is going to depend on the app. If the app is written for mpich, you have to use mpich. If it's written for bproc, you need to use bproc. If you're writing it, look around at the various technologies and see which one you like the most. MPI is a smallish layer above sockets that allows you to explicitly pass messages from cluster node to cluster node. Bproc allows a program to fork across the nodes of a cluster and then join back together.
For just getting started (and I'm probably biased since I work for scyld), Beowulf is awesome! The latest distro is about to go beta fairly soon. It installs on top of redhat, and right after you install, you can power up the nodes and if they're set to pxe, all the nodes will come up as compute nodes. It comes with MPICH and Bproc and a few interesting demos (tachyon, a raytracer; and a fractals program) and linpack. The only bad thing about Bproc is that it has to patch the kernel. However, it works very well. I've heard bad things about OpenMosix, it does some fairly bad things like migrating file descriptors and some other silly things. The main thing is it's pretty much a hack to get threadded applications not intended to be clustered to distribute across nodes, which is just... not a good thing. Applications should be written to work in a clustered environment.
Anyway, have fun!
I talked to some of the few people who were testing these. Apparently it couldn't keep linux running for more than 4 minutes. Lets hope Intel was able to fix that "issue"
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If you're going for Boost, you're diving into a sea of angry template-metaprogramming. What's seriously needed in the world of mathy software is more really good computational geometry packages. What doesn't exist right now (to my knowledge) is an open source implementation of M. Held's algorithm for generating generalized voronoi diagrams from poly-line curves (arcs and lines). Open source manufacturing is picking up and the algorithms to actually take the level sets, generate toolpaths, and all this are just starting to bubble up. This would be an excellent domain for an applied mathematician to dive into. Just make sure to try and get someone to watch over your shoulder to make sure the API is nice.
I smell an SGI naming convention, i.e. RealityEngine
I really hate to say it, but basic on micro controllers has been done way way way too much. I think it would be far more appealing if you could write a small JVM for it (pretty easy), or have the user write their programs in C where the firmware serves as kind of a network bootloader, and you release the tcp stack and web server stuff as a library.
I've been working at fairly big tech companies since I was 14 and haven't had a problem. If they need you, they hire you. Google was just being really, really assholic in this case.
I go to summit prep, and I know a ton of the students that went to HTH. It was pretty much a complete failure. Students thought the school was a complete joke, I didn't really talk to them much about how, but the jist of it was that nobody really did any real work. Summit on the other hand is doing great things, don't think that just because 'prep' is in the name that all the students are privileged. Most aren't. Many came from really tough backgrounds, and the principal is doing some pretty great things, and the teachers really seem to care that their students are learning and are retaining the information. Keep in mind it is a charter school, not a private school. So it's basically just a public school that's getting onto it's feet.
What do you want to DO with it? To get one thing straight, beowulf is a distribution, and bproc/mosix/lam/mpich are ways of getting apps to communicate over a cluster. What technology you use is going to depend on the app. If the app is written for mpich, you have to use mpich. If it's written for bproc, you need to use bproc. If you're writing it, look around at the various technologies and see which one you like the most. MPI is a smallish layer above sockets that allows you to explicitly pass messages from cluster node to cluster node. Bproc allows a program to fork across the nodes of a cluster and then join back together. For just getting started (and I'm probably biased since I work for scyld), Beowulf is awesome! The latest distro is about to go beta fairly soon. It installs on top of redhat, and right after you install, you can power up the nodes and if they're set to pxe, all the nodes will come up as compute nodes. It comes with MPICH and Bproc and a few interesting demos (tachyon, a raytracer; and a fractals program) and linpack. The only bad thing about Bproc is that it has to patch the kernel. However, it works very well. I've heard bad things about OpenMosix, it does some fairly bad things like migrating file descriptors and some other silly things. The main thing is it's pretty much a hack to get threadded applications not intended to be clustered to distribute across nodes, which is just... not a good thing. Applications should be written to work in a clustered environment. Anyway, have fun!
Don't rootkits run as kernel mode drivers?
For all of those underwater houses.
I talked to some of the few people who were testing these. Apparently it couldn't keep linux running for more than 4 minutes. Lets hope Intel was able to fix that "issue"