[Beowulf] A cluster of Arduinos

[Vincent Diepeveen]

On Jan 12, 2012, at 4:10 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

>
>
> On 1/12/12 6:39 AM, "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>> The average guy is not interested in knowing all details regarding
>> how to
>> play tennis with a wooden racket from the 1980s, just around
>> the time when McEnroe was on the tennisfield playing there.
>>
>> Most people are more interested in whether you can win that grandslam
>> with what you produce.
>>
>> The nerds however are interested in how well you can do with a wooden
>> racket
>> from 1980s,therefore projecting your own interest upon those students
>> will just
>> get them desinterested and you will be judged by them as an
>> irrelevant person
>> in their life, whose name they soon forget.
>>
>
> Having spent some time recently in Human Resources meetings about  
> how to
> better recruit software people for JPL, I'd say that something that
> appeals to nerds and gives them something to do is not all bad.  
> Part of
> the educational process is to find and separate the people who are
> interested and have a passion.  I'm not sure that someone who starts
> getting into clusters mostly because they are interested in  
> breaking into
> the Top500 is the target audience in any case.
>
> If you look over the hobby clusters out there, the vast majority  
> are "hey,
> I heard about this interesting idea, I scrounged up N old/small/ 
> slow/easy
> to find computers and tried to cluster them and do something.  I  
> learned
> something about cluster administration, and it was fun, but I don't  
> use it
> anymore"
>
> This is exactly the population you want to hit.  Bring in 100 advanced
> high school (grade 11-12 in US) students.  Have them all use cheap
> hardware to do a cluster.  Some fraction will think, "this is kind of
> cool, maybe I should major in CS instead of X"  Some fraction will  
> think,

Your example here will just take care a big number of students don't  
want
to have to do anything with those studies, as there is a few lame nerds
there who toy with equipment that's factor 50k slower (adding to the  
factor 500
the object oriented slowdown of factor 100)  than what they have
at home, and it can do nothing useful.

But in this specific case you'll just scare away students and the  
real clever ones
will get total desinterested as you are busy with lame duck speed  
type cpu's.

If you'd build a small marsrover with it that would be something else  
of course.

> "how lame, why not make the single processor faster", and they can be
> CompEng or EE majors looking at how to reduce feature sizes and get  
> the
> heat out.
>
> It's just like biology or chemistry classes.  In high school biology
> (9th/10th grade) most of it is mundane memorization (Krebs cycle,  
> various
> descriptive stuff.  Other than the use of cheap cmos cameras,  
> microscopes
> used at this level haven't really changed much in the last 100  
> years (and
> the microscopes at my kids' school are probably 10-20 years old). They
> also do some more modern molecular biology in a series of labs partly
> funded by Amgen:   Some recombinant DNA to put fluorescent proteins  
> in a
> bacteria, running some gels, etc.  The vast majority of the  
> students will
> NOT go on to a career in biology, but some fraction do, they get
> interested in some aspect, and they wind up majoring in bio, or  
> being a
> pre-med, etc.
>
> Not everyone is looking for the world beater.  A lot of kids start  
> with
> Kart racing, even though even the fastest Karts aren't as fast as  
> F1 (or
> even a Smart Car).  How many engineers started with dismantling the
> lawnmower engine?
>
>
> For my own work, I'd rather have people who are interested in solving
> problems by ganging up multiple failure prone processors, rather than
> centralizing it all in one monolithic box (even if the box happens  
> to have
> multiple cores).
>
>
>