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On Monday 23 February 2009 10:04, Gordon Henderson wrote: > On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Tom Potts wrote: ... > Tasks for the home user to do with clusters (or even multi-processor) > systems that work well include graphics rendering - ray tracing - give the > same data-set to all processors and just tell them to do a particular area > then merge the results at the end - sort of thing. (You can simulate all > sorts of things like this - eg. a weather) Fractal generation was always > the classic demo here too. I spent a while clustering to do raytracing and in the process realised that it was a bit pointless - ray tracing (small data large processing) is ideal for sharing out amongst machines: each machine takes a small part of the task and, when finished comes back for more. I ended up with a 386 that did 1 frame in the time a PIII did about 200 but it still 'helped'. I grant you that old fortran programs and clusters join well together and there aint many of us left that can make head nor tail of a fortran program anymore (but then A level maths is now as hard as my Olevel maths so fortran is going to be beyond most kids these days) but often reviewing the task against current libraries would make the problem 'collapse' anyway. Bit like virtualisation - I reviewed my tasks and no longer even consider running multiple operating systems on one machine. > > I think it's relatively trivial to build a "cluster" these days, but it's > still as hard as ever to effectively program them. > > Oh well... We have made great steps forward in technology over the last thirty years but I think I can safely say that if Bill Shakespeare had had a word processor he would have never written anything memorable - he would have spent his whole life formatting corrie scripts beautifully, and maybe sidling around the metadata and writing about how someone ought to express this in a play form... Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html