[Beowulf] What can a HS student do with a small Beowulf?

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 23 May 2006, sNAAPS eLYK wrote:

> Forgive my newness, but does Java/Perl have the instructions for assigning
> queues and certain work to seperate processors?
> That's what I should have asked in the first place...
> Thanks!

I know nothing about java, but perl supports threads these days.  I
wrote a very simple master-slave job distribution demo using
perl+threads for Cluster World Magazine in the first few issues.
However, perl doesn't have support native (AFAIK).  Still, with threads
and the ability to do sockets and the ability to run arbitrary system
commands (in their own threads) there is little you can't do with it one
way or another.

I view this as a learning thing, though.  Real Programmers use C or
Fortran, Real Parallel Programmers use C or Fortran and PVM or MPI
(probably MPI, but a lot of Old Guys still use PVM:-).  Or raw sockets,
of course...

[Just kidding.  Everybody knows that the fastest interconnects run
fastest when they aren't running TCP/IP sockets...;-)]

    rgb

>> Another one is to load in a city bus/train schedule, and have it determine
>> optimal routes between points.  A more challenging one is the "travelling
>> salesman" problem (minimizing the length of total trip to traverse all
>> nodes of a graph).

...using a genetic algorithm and/or simulated annealing, of course.  Or
only using a very few cities...;-)

I just LOVES high dimensional problems, I does...

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu