Newbie Alert: Beginning parallel programming with Scyld

[Kevin Cole]

Hi all,

I just set up a Scyld Basic Beowulf cluster, and have no experience
with how to write code to take advantage of it.  I was a mainframe
FORTRAN and assembler language programmer for many years (lots of 
different architectures), and have very limited exposure to C.
(These days, for MOST of what I want to do, Python gets the job done.)
However a physics prof. here does have a problem in mind that involves
manipulating several satellite images, and as I understand it, he's 
written a non-parallelized program that's grinding through the data 
very slowly.  I think he coded it in C.

Are there any nice, free tests that I can write (or download and untar)
that will let me see the effects of what I've got?  What's a good 
starting point?  I thought about POV-RAY, but when I went to download, it
said I'd need a newer glibc than what came with the Scyld Basic CD's (RH 6.2
w/ a 2.2 kernel, and I forget what version of glibc.)

On a related note, are there resources I should be looking at to try to
bring this cluster up to date?  At this point, it's more of an experiment
and we're not yet willing to throw money at the project. 

Thanks!

-- 
 Kevin Cole, RHCE, Linux Admin  |  Key ID:  0xE6F332C7
 Gallaudet Research Institute   |  WWW:     http://gri.gallaudet.edu/~kjcole/
 Hall Memorial Bldg  S-419      |  Voice:   (202) 651-5135
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