[Beowulf] Random numbers (was Re: /dev/random entropy on stateless/headless nodes)

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 1 Mar 2011, Heiko Bauke wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:03:33 -0500 (EST)
> "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
>
>> It would also be very interesting to try feeding one of your MRG or
>> YARN-type generators into dieharder and running the full series of
>> tests on it (there are actually several diehard tests in dieharder
>> that look for hyperplanar correlations as well as the long tail
>> "monkey" tests). If I ever have time I'll try to give it a shot.  Is
>> the library and/or a cli available anyplace easy to find?
>
> there is an open source C++ library implementing our YARN generators and
> others, see http://trng.berlios.de/ and http://trng.berlios.de/trng.pdf .

Thanks, I grabbed it.  I don't usually use C++, but hopefully I can link
this back to a C interface or at worst write a simple CLI program to
spit out a binary stream.  dieharder can test a binary stream via a pipe
(it is set up to test "large" numbers of random numbers, much larger
than diehard, although practically speaking many of the tests are
asymtotic and fail if you try to test the 10^12 and up numbers of rands
used in many modern MC computations.  But it at least makes it easy (and
still fairly reliable) to test 10^9 or more.  (I'd love to make it work
for longer streams, but that proves to be remarkably difficult for
numerical reasons, for at least the most "interesting" tests...:-).

Might take a while to get around to this, but if/when I do I'll try to
let you know.

    rgb

>
>
> 	Heiko
>
>
> -- 
> -- Irrend lernt man.
> -- (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832)
> -- Number Crunch Blog @ http://numbercrunch.de
> --        Heiko Bauke @ http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/personalhomes/bauke
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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