[Beowulf] HPC demonstrations

[Skylar Thompson]

On 02/10/2015 02:52 AM, John Hearns wrote:
> I am giving an internal talk tomorrow, a lightweight introduction to HPC.
> 
>  
> 
> Can anyone suggest any demonstrations of HPC which I could give –
> something visual?
> 
> Or are there any videos I could pick up from somewhere?
> 
>  
> 
> I ahad thought on showing an H-bomb test video from Youtube, and saying
> “Well, you aran’t allowed to do that any more”

Hi John,

It might be too late, but I like to use GalaxSee[1] and Life[2] as HPC
demos. They're now maintained by the Shodor Foundation, although
Galaxsee's heritage predates it. I've used them in the context of the
Bootable Cluster CD although you can run anywhere with X11, MPI and a C
compiler.

What's nice about them:

1. They're visual in a way that emphasizes the parallelism of the algorithms

2. They're simple enough for even beginning computational scientists to
understand

3. They're easily tunable for different problem set sizes

Skylar

[1] http://bccd.net/wiki/index.php/GalaxSee

[2] http://bccd.net/wiki/index.php/Game_of_Life