Submission + - Cool/weird stuff to do on a cluster ?
Gori writes: Hello Slashdot,
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) , and we build Serious Games, often played via the net). Recently, we managed to get a bunch of KEURos for a High Performance Cluster to run our stuff on. The code is mostly written in in Java. Our IT support people are very capable of setting up a stable cluster that will run java perfectly. But where is the fun in that ?
What I am 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 bad ass switches, a massive storage array, plus a bunch of UltraSPARC boxes thrown in for good measure).
So at times when there are no stuff to crunch, I would 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 no CE/CS people, but we are geeky enough...
So SlashdotHiveBrain, what would be the coolest/most far out thing you would do with this kind of hardware ?
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) , and we build Serious Games, often played via the net). Recently, we managed to get a bunch of KEURos for a High Performance Cluster to run our stuff on. The code is mostly written in in Java. Our IT support people are very capable of setting up a stable cluster that will run java perfectly. But where is the fun in that ?
What I am 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 bad ass switches, a massive storage array, plus a bunch of UltraSPARC boxes thrown in for good measure).
So at times when there are no stuff to crunch, I would 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 no CE/CS people, but we are geeky enough...
So SlashdotHiveBrain, what would be the coolest/most far out thing you would do with this kind of hardware ?
