[Beowulf] massive parallel processing application required

[Jim Lux]

At 03:17 AM 1/31/2007, Mitchell Wisidagamage wrote:
>Thank you very much for the fire dynamics idea. I will have a look at it.
>
>I did try to contact many e-science projects including some 
>researchers at Oxford. But I got no reply. Then I went to get some 
>contacts from a tutor who worked at a e-science project himself. He 
>told me people, especially scientists are "very jealous" of their 
>data. And not replying is a kind way of saying "no". And there's the 
>problem of "who's this guy wanting my data", "what will he do with it?".
>
>I have given up the e-science idea. Now looking for other real world 
>applications.


Optimum path routing of ships and/or airplanes, taking into account 
the winds, currents, sea state, temperatures, etc.

Large realtime and climatological databases are available.
The path optimization algorithms are simple and fairly well known (A 
and A-star are two to start with).  The challenge is in suitable 
heuristics to prune the search space.

You can optimize for minimum time in transit, or minimum fuel cost, 
or minimum probability of delay, etc.

You can burn a lot of compute cycles even doing a fairly simple route 
(say, Los Angeles to Yokohama by ship or New York to Los Angeles by 
air), because the search space is quite dense (probably don't want to 
change course too often, but that's still hundreds of waypoints).. 
and then, after you've found the route, you should (either by looking 
at what you calculated during route finding, or as a post process 
step) do a sensitivity analysis to see how critical the routing is 
(if small variations in climate/weather cause huge changes in time, 
that's a bad thing)



>Thanks,
>Mitchell

James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875