I have a good one: generate a mandelbrot fractal. It's interesting because you can see it move through iterations faster as you add more processors to it. Of course, this means you need to ssh into the head node from a system with X-windows, and be able to run parallel jobs interactively. I remember seeing a demo of the first Linux cluster I saw IRL using this, and it was a homework assignment in my parallel programming class years ago.
Google "parallel fractal generator", and you should find a bunch of its. -- Prentice On 09/19/2012 04:57 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote: > Bringing up an excellent question for "learning to cluster" activities.. > What would be a good sample program to try. There was (is?) a MPI version of > PoVRAY, as I recall. It was nice because it's showy and you can easily see > if you're getting a speedup. > Computing pi isn't very dramatic, especially since most people don't have a > feel for how fast it should run. > > Some sort of n-body code, perhaps? > > Something that does pattern matching? > > There's a lot of MPI enabled finite element codes, but a lot don't have a > flashy output. > > And you'd like something that actually makes use of internode communication > in a meaningful way (because you could play with reconfiguring it, by > plugging and unplugging cables), so embarrassingly parallel isn't as > impressive. (e.g. rendering frames of an animation.. so what if you do it 10 > times faster with 10 computers) > > Jim Lux > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Bogdan Costescu > Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 3:33 AM > To: Daniel Kidger > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Beowulf] FY;) GROMACS on the Raspberry Pi > > On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Daniel Kidger<[email protected]> > wrote: >> I touched on the Gromacs port to ClearSpeed when I worked there - I >> then went on to write the port of AMBER to CS plus I have a pair of >> RPis that I tinker with. > I'm not quite sure what the interest is... GROMACS is quite famous for having > non-bonded kernels written in assembler and using features of the modern > CPUs, but this is limited to some<snip> > > and will have a larger power consumption; plus with so many components, the > risk of one or more breaking and reducing the overall compute power is quite > high. So is it worth it ? > (as a scientist I look at it from the perspective of getting useful results > from calculations; as a learning experience, it's surely useful, but then > running any software using MPI would be) > > Cheers, > Bogdan > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
