Cool/Weird Stuff To Do On a Cluster? 608
Gori writes "I'm a researcher at a university. Our group mainly does Agent Based Modeling of interdisciplinary problems (think massive simulations where technology, policy, and economics meet). Recently, we managed to get a bunch of money for a High Performance Cluster to run our stuff on. The code is mostly written in Java. Our IT support people are very capable of setting up a stable cluster that will run Java perfectly. But where's the fun in that? What I'm trying to figure out are other, more far-out and interesting things to do with this machine — think 500+ Opteron cores, 2 GB RAM per core, a gigabit interconnect with some badass switches, a massive storage array, plus a bunch of UltraSPARC boxes. So at times when there's no stuff to crunch, I'd like to boot the thing up with a 'weird' system image and geek around in the name of science. Try fancy ways of building models, dynamically adding all sorts of hardware to it, etc. Have different schedulers compete for resources. Imagine a Matlab vs. Boinc vs. ProActive shootout. Maybe run plan9 on it? Most of us are not CE/CS people, but we are geeky enough. So, what would be the coolest and most far out thing you would do with this kind of hardware ?"
How about you don't? (Score:5, Insightful)
And save the environment a little bit?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> And save the environment a little bit?
That is one of the sanest postings I've come across on slashdot. So why is it marked as a troll?
Re:How about you don't? (Score:5, Funny)
Meanwhile, back to the main article topic (Score:3, Informative)
Are there limits to the fact that when a charged particle is accelerated, it emits a photon? I was once told that below a certain point, the charge does not emit a photon. Really? Why? A possibly useful phenomenon needs relevant data! Thanks!
Re:How about you don't? (Score:4, Funny)
>> And save the environment a little bit?
>
>That is one of the sanest postings I've come across on slashdot. So why is it marked as a troll?
Hippies are the worst kinds of trolls.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No, we're the best kind of trolls. Come on, who's better at pissing people off than a smug, whiny hippie like me?
Re:How about you don't? (Score:5, Funny)
I would have to agree with you sir. Nothing pisses me off more than hippies.
Re:How about you don't? (Score:5, Funny)
Cartman? Is that you?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Come on, who's better at pissing people off than a smug, whiny hippie like me?"
A smug, whiny, know-it-all smartalec like me.
Re:How about you don't? (Score:4, Funny)
Hippies aren't REALLY trolls, they just smell like them!
Re:How about you don't? (Score:5, Insightful)
because it won't make one iota of difference to the environment whether that thing is on or off, your one of those token bullshit symbolism over substance wanks. That's as stupid as advocating abolishing drag racing to save gasoline.
Re:How about you don't? (Score:4, Insightful)
"because it won't make one iota of difference to the environment whether that thing is on or off..."
assuming it's 500 cores, and also assuming (conservatively) that the diffrence between idle and full load is only 100 watts per processing unit - that means about 50 extra KWh consumed by this thing at near full utilization.
X 24 hours = about 1.2 million watts.
1 short ton of coal yields about 2500 KWh of electricity at average efficiencies.
If I've done the math right, you can imagine dumping an extra 1/2 ton of coal on a fire somewhere to run this thing (at load) for 1 day.
According to DOE - Burning coal produces 2.117 lbs of carbon per KWh. So even 1 hour at full load introduces an additional 50 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere
Again, all assuming this cluster sits somewhere (like america) where most of the electricity gets generated from coal or other fossil fuels. YMMV.
Important to remember - there isn't any storage or margin in the power grid. Every time turn on a light switch or run a CPU up to max with SuperPrime, somewhere a turbine starts turning that little bit faster - it's always got to be nearly in balance.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I respectfully suggest that 'saving the environment' while laudable, needs to be taken in context. Sure, don't drive to the mall with your friends, all in your own cars. Do, however, keep doing things to advance the state of our knowledge - geeky fun with a massive load of hardware, for example, unless we are talking 'substantial' environmental impact. What constitutes 'substantial' is, of course, subjective, but at least think about it and don't just say, "Well, it uses energy and gives off heat - BAD!"
To
Re:How about you don't? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Right on!
If you're looking for something weird to with on a cluster, try fucking it. At least, leave a dead fish/mouse inside one of the cases.
Nothing like hypocrisy! (Score:4, Insightful)
Couldn't you be doing something yourself to save the environment right now - something like turning off YOUR computer instead of browsing slashdot? Oh, wait - that would require YOU to do something. That kind of environmental activism is never as much fun as simply preaching to other people what THEY should be doing. Hypocrisy is SO much fun - carry on!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Al Gore is that you posting from your CO2 spewing private jet?
Re:Nothing like hypocrisy! (Score:4, Funny)
Except that I'm posting this from my solar-powered Tandy Model 100, connected via serial to my hand-crank operated OKI-900, dialed into Suncoast Freenet...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Simulate the oil futures market and figure out with precision the effect the "Enron loophole" has had on the price of oil. Publish results.
Re:How about you don't? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How about you don't? (Score:4, Insightful)
figure out a way to run 5000 simultaneous desktop environments on those 500 processors... and that might help the environment quite a lot
Re:How about you don't? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, we are designing a sophisticated monitoring and control system that will power down all the nodes that have nothing to do. Sustainability is *the* reason why we build models in the first place. Most of them are used to estimate CO2 emissions of different future industrial systems.. so yeas, you are right, this is an important issue...
Not far out but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
better yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Rosetta @ home or fold.it
Or you could try to thermally load them in patterns that produced different tones on the fans (or maybe an AM radio) record it then speed it up. Maybe you could make it sound like a baluga whale.
Or maybe you could implement a virtual machine cluster of 250 cores. The repeat the process till you see how many virtual machines you can stack on top of each other till it has the same speed as a single processor.
While this might sound stupid this would give us a rough estimate of how many watts per virtual world it takes and from that we could figure out how many layers deep in the simulation we actually live assuming the top level one is powered by something less than 1 sol of power.
or work out all possible moves in N-space tic-tac-toe. The only smart move is not to play.
Re:better yet (Score:5, Funny)
Best idea yet.
We need to learn to hack reality, and take over the simulation.
Plus hacking reality just sounds awesome.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hacking reality? That sound like Engineering to me.
Re:better yet (Score:5, Insightful)
I think reverse-engineering reality is called "Physics".
Re:better yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try to solve go.
Re:better yet (Score:5, Funny)
Buahahahaha! Make it recursive and STACK OVERFLOW THE WORLD!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/350/ [xkcd.com]
Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, it should be used to find The Ultimate Question [wikipedia.org].
Re:Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Program a strong AI and then ask it if entropy can be reduced.
Re:Vista? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
You should maybe hide your signature when you say things like that.
Itg is widely accepted that Vista is a waste of resources, and therefore all articles about powerful computer resources are going to have Vista jokes. You can't kill off a meme on your own. If you don't like repetetive humour then perhaps you should change your moderation to mod down all funny comments.
Anyway, slightly back on topic - I think they'd want to keep it a cluster rather than degenerate into a clusterfuck, so it may be better to avoid installing Vista.
Re:Vista? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You may laugh, but Mac OS X Panther (2003) ran just fine on a 500Mhz processor with 256MB RAM and a Rage 128, although its install size was more than 500MB and the installer was more complicated than dd.
I know 2003 was quite a while ago, but it just goes to show that modern OSs don't have to require GBs of RAM and malti-core multi-GHz processors.
You can hope (Score:4, Funny)
that it will be fast enough to run Duke Nukem Forever when it gets released.
Re:You can hope (Score:4, Interesting)
Although that was the easiest meme, It gave me an idea. Perhaps you could try some very-very-very high resolution ray tracing. I hear that such a process scales well with parallelism.
side note: captcha = shading
Imagine . . . (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Imagine . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh. So the endless Beowulf jokes are funny to you, but the nowhere near as long running Vista ones aren't? You perhaps should go into therapy to resolve your Vista issues. I'm intrigued as to why you consider it better than XP in any way.. apart from apparently the calendar is more comprehensive than XP for tracking changes in our date system over the last while.. but other than that. I honestly don't see the benefits. I'm not being hypocritical either - I was doing fine with 98 until games started requiring XP. And I'm writing this on OS X.
Only the second time? (Score:5, Funny)
Use your powers for good. (Score:2)
Coolest? (Score:5, Insightful)
"So, what would be the coolest and most far out thing you would do with this kind of hardware?"
Instead of pissing around with stuff that may not go anywhere other than a few giggles over lunch.
Why not just rent, or lend it out to people who don't have the funding or equipment that could use this cluster for a better purpose than "playing around"?
Just saying...
Re:Coolest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its incredible a university would let this kind of equipment go to waste. If people arent clamoring to run things then you either have a non-existent (or terrible) CS department or too much money that should have gone elsewhere.
Regardless, there are tons of grid clients out there. There's always something to run.
Re:Coolest? (Score:5, Interesting)
Started me rethinking my Doctorate plans in CS. If this pool of PhD's couldn't figure out that you were going to need to maintain the systems and have a number of people to work on it, then what the hell, book learnin didn't get them very far.
I'm sure though, that their thought was that once they got it in that surely the Administration would budget for maintenance.
This was an SGI system about 6 years ago.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is pretty much the way that grant money works in many disciplines. Don't budget for maintenance or "upgrades," or else the original bid is going to come in far too high to ever be approved in the first place.
Physicists often blame the cancellation of the SSC [wikipedia.org] on the fact that it was realistically priced when it was canceled (and $2bn had already been thrown down the toilet).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly, I have also seen waste like this. I know of a cluster that can only be 75% of the nodes can be turned on, because the building to house it was delayed a year and it's in a temporary space, but the money was allocated and had to be spent before the space was ready. If the money wasn't spent, the money would be taken away. I've been a cluster admin for a cluster that barely had 10% usage and I almost cried. Interestingly, this ties in with the "parallel programming is hard" problem. Some researchers do
Re:Coolest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me see if I can help explain...
Money comes in to education through grants. Grants are usually awarded to whoever can make the best case. You'll notice I didn't say "deserving" or "beneficial to mankind" case. The best case is often the one that's written by someone who knows how to game the system be it through politics or releasing sensationalist research that may not prove anything much to anyone.
Publishing articles are kinda nice. Publishing books is usefull for a little extra income from screwing your students who have to buy the latest version you update each year. Having the media pick up your research because you just claimed women are smarter than men and the secret to cold fusion powered cars that also run on water is far, far better.
Once you have this money, it's yours to do with as you wish. Just one thing. Don't ever, ever let it be seen that you didn't really need it. If that happens, how much budget do you think the university is going to give you on the years where your grant applications fail? How about those you beg for money from, next time? If you got money to buy a supercomputer, you need it, 24/7, until you declare it's obsolete. If you don't, they might ask why a pretty-nifty-computer wouldn't have worked just as well. And so, for that reason, no one else gets time on it. Hell, you might only need it because it turns out it's the perfect sized doorstop for a door you had... but let anyone think you don't need it and you're screwed in the magical world of academia.
It's in conflict with the notion of academia being "for the good of mankind" but no more so than the notion of government being "for the people." Both simply serve the people within it... researchers or politicians. The rest is set dressing to ensure others keep paying for it.
Re: (Score:3)
The question was "So, what would be the coolest and most far out thing you would do with this kind of hardware ?"
Playing around and looking for the most far out stuff is perfectly fine. No need to get mainstream boring _all_the_time_.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...But if what you normally do on the cluster/system is "boring" then maybe you are in the wrong field of investigation.
And, if you did rent/lend it out to another group of people, you may be just as interested in what they are doing with it, and what they are doing may correlate to what you are doing.
Perhaps that third party is doing the "playing around", but if you rented it out to them for something they can afford, you are still using the system for a benefit to them, as well as your goals (extra money
Re:Coolest? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
that could use this cluster for a better purpose than "playing around"?
Guys, a lot of useful pure research is mostly just playing around. Take a few ideas as a baseline to get you started, then play around until you reach that "hey, that's funny..." moment. Challenge the limits as a goal in itself, then see how things act on the edge, apply rules and discipline to your game when it gets interesting.
The only real difference between play and pure research is whether or not you keep a decent lab journal.
Gentoo DistCC (Score:2, Funny)
Because Gentoo is just hours of fun....
compiling.
Donate it to a CS Dept.? (Score:2, Funny)
:-)
power it down (Score:2, Funny)
power it off and go get a blow job. You might like it.
high performance java? (Score:3, Funny)
You have a high-performance cluster, and you're running Java? I bet the OS in windows, too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
C.
Also, 20% is no small number. (Damn filter. Ruined my one-character post.)
Re:high performance java? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're just an armchair critic who has never had to write serious multi-threaded code, it's very easy to say "do it in C". I'm coding in C now for an embedded platform, but if it was a desktop PC, you can bet I would choose to wri
low performance java (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wanna fill your spare cycles? Go to your Mathematics department and have a chat to the post-graduate students in non-linear algebra
Provide access to registered user projects (Score:2, Interesting)
Easy one. (Score:3, Funny)
Get it to play a game of Tic-tac-Toe against itself. Give us some WOPR love!
Artificial Intelegence (Score:2, Interesting)
Being massively parallel it could be interesting to do some AI research. Like chess algorithms or something more fun perhaps a good automated tech support system via chat. Or trying to decode, capatacha. Map optimizations... a bunch of fun stuff. At least it would be for me.
Run Crysis on high (Score:3, Interesting)
How about a game? (Score:5, Funny)
Poker
Fighter Combat
Guerrilla Engagement
Desert Warefare
Air-to-Ground Actions
Theaterwide Tactical Warfare
Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare
Global Thermonuclear War
??
Super photogenesis (Score:5, Funny)
Logic dictates that one of the resulting pictures would have to be of John Lennon kicking George W Bush in the nuts, find that picture and post it on failblog.
Voila.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Super photogenesis (Score:5, Funny)
1. Create every possible mp3 upto 5 minutes long.
2. Sue the record companies for every song they release from that point on.
3. Profit.
Re:Super photogenesis (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting ramifications:
- Theoretically, there should be enough similar pictures to create movie of a ball-kicking fight between Lennon and Bush.
- You would have just also recreated the entire world's supply of past and future porn, albeit thumbnailed down to 255*255, and limited to 65k color.
- You would have produced at least one picture of a second shooter on the grassy knoll, even if there wasn't one to begin with.
Re:Super photogenesis (Score:4, Insightful)
As well as all porn being thumbnailed, why not find the tiles for it in HD resolution instead? Or better yet, in 10000X10000 pixels?
So in essence, such a program would spit out every frame of every movie, in better than current HD resolution, that will ever be made by humans (or aliens, or anything). It would also contain the entire set of human books, past and future, and alien books for that matter, along with the correct method to translate it. It would have every bit of knowledge possible to fit into a 2 dimensional representation written down for us to read right now.
Which is all very exciting until you realise that it is, of course, not possible to do with computers in any meaningful timescale within a Universe, and for every correct set of blueprints for a time machine there must be an almost infinite set of incorrect ones which are indistinguishable from all the others until you build it.
As an interesting aside, I wonder what size bitmap it IS capable for - 2X2? 4X4?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Super photogenesis (Score:5, Informative)
Far, far longer than that. Even if we assume only 1 bit per pixel, 255x255=65025 bits. So each bitmap is basically just a number, 65025 bits long, and you want all permutations of them. So the problem of generating the bitmaps devolves into "count from 0 to 2^65025".
Of course, 2^65025 is a very, very big number. How long would it take to count that high? Assume you can magically do the increment in one cycle, and you have super-unbelievably fast 4GHz processors with absolutely no overhead and perfect scalability. You also do no processing on the image whatsoever, you simply iterate through them. So each core is processing a phenomenal 4 billion images every second. You have 500 cores, so you're chewing through a grand total of 2 trillion images a second. Wow, that's pretty damned fast!
2 trillion is almost 2^41. So if you're getting through 2^41 images every second, that means it will take a mere... 2^65025 / 2^41 = 2^1586 seconds.
There are roughly 2^25 seconds in a year, so that means you're going to be able to complete this count in a mere 2^63 years. That's 9 billion billion years, much longer than the lifespan of the universe. And that's merely to iterate through the images with no processing whatsover. Increase the computing power by a factor of a billion, and it would still take 9 billion years just to count them.
Obviously (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Super photogenesis (Score:5, Funny)
Run protein folding (Score:5, Interesting)
Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
There was this one incident when me and this girl turned a cabinet over on it's side and used it as a surface for sex play. That was different. It didn't get weird until she insisted that I tie her wrists with some Cat 5 though.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
That *is* weird.
Cat 6 is much better.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
So - you are suggesting a clusterf*ck?....
Give me an account...I'm being serious (Score:5, Interesting)
"We're gonna need a bigger map..." (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone else think a 2^16 vs. 2^16 Team Fortress game would be pretty cool?
Why not... (Score:5, Interesting)
as some have said, donate the time to people would like to buy it but can't, or on odd days turn up 1000 SETI@home processes and see how far it gets?
Create a reverse Google bomb - Index every link to say 'george bush' from Google, read each page into memory hash the words, assigning value by count amongst all the pages, and then post the top ten words on GW that are not 'the' 'a' 'was' etc.
Perhaps comparing this to the same process on Paris Hilton would be a report that sparks SkyNet to life. I don't know. Seriously, if those two have 6 of the top ten words in common it would have to mean something.
If you have all that cpu sitting idle, that is the kind of weird shit nobody else would do, but also couldn't not read the report either. Perhaps you'll start something new for Google Trends? :)
Rendering (Score:5, Interesting)
I do burn-in testing on a lot of the machines we get at work, using hardware I can't personally afford.
My favorite test is to find scenes to render with a raytracer.. yafray is my favorite, runs on all major platforms. But not just any scene, it has to have all the details turned up to 11, contain extremely high detail (polygon counts drive up memory usage), and write out an absurdly large image.
Kind of whimsical but it's hard to not be impressed by an image 20,000 pixels square with perfectly accurate reflections. Who cares if I can only fit a fraction of it on my monitor. ;)
Other options. (Score:5, Interesting)
A variant on the rendering theme: Instead of simulating rays, simulate light wavelets and the modern theory of light. You should have enough compute power there to render reasonable scenes using such a technique.
Fluid dynamics: This is a popular one, and NASA offer source codes for free for subsonic, supersonic and even hypersonic flows. In fact, they offer quite a number of subsonic ones. They're also not the only source. There's several open-source CFD packages, ranging from river simulations to aircraft simulations.
Supernovae simulation: There are packages (freeish, rather restricted in access) that allow you to simulate thermonuclear and supernovae explosions within stars. The restrictions are for rather obvious reasons, even though the odds of anyone nasty obtaining a star is, well, unlikely.
COLOSSUS: There are still a couple of ENIGMA ciphers that have never been broken, which can be obtained along with the algorithm Colossus used in World War II to crack such codes. You could complete the set and maybe discover some lost secret (yeah, right).
BLAST: Other posters have suggested renting out the computer time, but that just transfers the problem of what to run, rather than solving it. BLAST, or one of the MPI-based variants thereof, is an exceedingly popular tool for examining nucleotide sequences, but as the databases grow ever-larger, the demand for ever-more information also increases, creating a need for significant compute power to produce the volume of results desired.
Stone Soup (Score:5, Insightful)
I (Mat) work at Vanderbilt University's supercomputing center. Our university supercomputing center was originally a joint venture between the proteomics and high-energy physics departments, but they decided to make it a independent university-wide initiative to bring HPC tools to all users.
Before we founded the center, there were a lot of groups that required computing on campus, but it was highly inefficient. Their local clusters had lots of free cycles (low return on asset) that they couldn't effectively share with other users, the clusters were down quite often (grad students and postdocs are poor sysadmins, plus they should be doing actual research anyway). Several other problems related to either pooling of resources or pooling of knowledge, you get the idea...
I highly recommend setting up a batch scheduler such as Torque/Maui and opening your cluster to all researchers on campus. You'd be surprised how much demand is out there. We have all the usual math/science/engineering/biomedical users, plus users in more esoteric fields (nursing, accounting, music, psychology). You can always give your group a higher job priority if needed. It gives a higher return on asset and gets lots of goodwill on campus (and, potentially, at funding agencies). You can charge users for support, storage, etc for cost recovery, or even use it as a revenue source if your grants allow.
Having different types of users also allows cross-pollination of ideas. We have a large number of biomedical researchers who are now using a high-energy physics software (geant), biomedial people who are teaching other users how to program in R, etc. These are avenues for research/discovery that didn't exist before.
Open Science Grid (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.opensciencegrid.org/ [opensciencegrid.org]
That way you can backfill the resource with jobs from VOs (Virtual Organizations, think projects/groups) you choose. It is similar to BOINC in the sense you can pick what science to support.
The idea is that the sharing will go both ways. You will give spare cycles to other users on OSG, and in return, you will be able to use spare cycles on other resources.
Spend some time on the OSG website reading the things under "Learn About Us". Also check out the research highlights to see what kind of science is being done on OSG resources:
http://www.opensciencegrid.org/About/Research_Using_OSG/Research_Highlights/Research_Highlights_Archive [opensciencegrid.org]
(Shameless plug - I'm part of this team) The good news is that OSG have an ongoing effort to help you join your resource to OSG, and help your users get going on the grid:
https://twiki.grid.iu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Engagement/WebHome [iu.edu]
xkcd (Score:5, Interesting)
xkcd Network [xkcd.com]
Make applications (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of randomly generating pictures or something as someone suggested above, why not make it generate say a 64k program, keep iterating through this until you get an executable that will actually RUN (Without crashing) and see what happens.
Gori, what university is this anyhow? (Score:3, Interesting)
How much CPU do ya got? (Score:4, Interesting)
If an infinite number of monkeys......
Write a program that creates random code and tries to run it, then starts again. Eventually, we'll have the Singularity and not have to worry about finding cool things to do.
Couple of (half-baked) ideas... (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading Slashdot dulls creativity sometimes... I suggest you deprive yourself of sleep, overdose on caffeine, read something by Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash or Diamond Age), and meditate on your question with a 2-3 geeky buddies of yours around 2am.
1) Find a picture/piece of code/ISO image/etc. you'd like to compress. Treat it as a very big number. Now find a prime number that comes very close to it. Compress it by treating it as the Nth prime + the remainder. Repeat for the remainder See if the compression is any better than bzip. (I think i saw something like this done for the DeCSS code once...)
2) Find something to optimize via brute-force. (My favorite is neural nets predicting time-series). Run a distributed simulated annealing algorithm. (Run an instance of the algorithm on every core, check every N cycles to see which core is more "optimal", share the parameters with the rest of the instances).
3) Create an interactive multi-user raytraced environment. Get someone to bring in an ImmersaDesk or a CAVE. Stun all visitors.
4) Model a giant neural network. Teach it to do something cool in real-time with your favorite training algorithm...
5) Get dictionaries from 50-60 languages. Write something to correlate similarity of words meaning the same thing. Make pretty graph clustering them by similarity. Post pretty graph on Slashdot.
6) ???
7) Profit!
Do Good in the World (Score:4, Informative)
A number of other posters have suggested this answer, but I wanted to emphasize it.
You are lucky enough to have a massive, desirable resource that is underutilized while we are in the midst of an academic funding environment which has been called the worst ever for supporting basic and applied research. You, as an academician, have an unwritten duty to help other academicians, and so rather than think of geeky ways to mess around with your new toy, why not share your wealth?
Here are the advantages:
1. You can wrangle additional publications out of it by being an author on published papers by providing sufficient support. Publications are the lifeblood of academics.
2. You can use it to leverage improved relations (or establish relations) with other departments within your university, or across universities. This might not seem like it would be worth much to you, but it will be impressive to your supervisors and department heads (they can take credit for it), and will make you look good in their eyes.
3. You can leverage it to good-news PR. University administrations love good PR. Talk to your PR department. Involve your department.
4. You can do good in the world.
I, personally, run an analysis of neural recordings every so often using Matlab that takes about a week on a reasonably modern dual-core system. It sure would be nice to have that finish in 1/500 as much time! There are about 20 or so researchers who are doing work like mine, and none of them, to my knowledge, are using a high-performance computing environment to analyze their data. It just isn't within their means. I'm not talking about some esoteric, arcane basic science research (although I'm a huge, huge proponent of that), but helping the paralyzed to walk again.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In my experience as a sysadmin, when you have a resource, your users want it to be "up" all the time, no matter what. If it's interactive, they'll leave VNC sessions or xterms or screen sessions running on it and want them to be there when they come back. If it's noninteractive (ie: a queue/batch system), your users want to be able to submit jobs now, without waiting for the sysadmin to come in and fire it all up and make it run.
Without some serious organizational political capital, it's pretty hard to pu
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That actually does sound interesting!
Even with one node on all the time... you could pretty reasonably pull that off with the rest of the nodes. You could even have it dynamically scale the "awake" part of the cluster to match the number of jobs in the queue or the utilization of the awake parts. Just imagining going from 200W to 30-40kW and back automatically, on demand... yeah, that'd be handy.
You could also tie into environmental factors ... scaling back the cluster if the HVAC is underperforming and t
Seriously, there is good research money to be had. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"muhahaha look at those noobs with 15FPS"
"why, whats your FPS?"
"its over 500.0"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit. No way, no how is C++ ten times faster than Java. You're smoking crack.