[Beowulf] How to make a BeagleBoard Elastic R Beowulf Cluster in a Briefcase

[lsi]

Thanks all for your responses,

I built my engine because I imagined it, and wanted to see if it was 
possible.  Problem, I don't know much about HPC apps, and tasks need 
to be coded up for my platform (I tried to keep it as portable as 
possible, but it has a some required hooks, etc).  So it was as much 
as I could do to come up with a test job...  the engine does work 
though, pic (this is a memory dump, not a render): 
http://www.cyberdelix.net/media/retro_fractal_by_lsi.gif

Each row of numbers was calculated by a node on the grid (although, 
because this is home HPC, the grid only had two nodes).

Ah yes, so it does have a little eye candy I guess but fractals are a 
bit gratuitous, I was hoping for a more serious application.  I 
considered hunting for primes or somesuch... but I'm not a 
mathematician or scientist and I don't understand what, for example, 
the sieve of Eratosthenes is meant to be outputting, so writing code 
to run it is very difficult!

This is especially problematic because, as is noted below, a demo is 
an important part of a proposal.

I think I need to get a computational science degree, or engage a 
mathematician or scientist, to progress my project.  I was hoping 
this would be my HAL 9000 but it turns out to need more than an 
engine, it needs apps too...

Thanks for the bistro tip Jim, nice one.. :)

Stu

On 16 Sep 2010 at 15:40, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

> > From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-
bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Douglas Eadline

> > As a builder of some cheapo home clusters I would say that
> > software development (owning the reset switch is nice),
> > problem development (staging a small version of a problem
> > before you scale it up), and running real codes (most
> > HPC apps don't scale that well in any case).
> 
> If you were writing proposals to scale up to hundreds of nodes,
> especially if you are self-funding the proposal work, then having
> demonstrated it on a cluster at all might lend credibility to your
> proposal, especially if the proposal evaluators are not
> cluster-afficionados (so they question the applicability of clusters
> in general, and are ignorant of the scaling issues) 

> > Of course I'm still trying to build my HAL 9000 clone.

> I don't think you want to do that, Doug...


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Stuart Udall
stuart at at cyberdelix.dot net - http://www.cyberdelix.net/

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 * Origin: lsi: revolution through evolution (192:168/0.2)