Hi Jim, How about bucket sort?
Make N as small as need be for cluster capability. Regards, Max --- On Tue, 20 Aug 2013 [email protected] wrote: > Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:23:53 +0000 > From: "Lux, Jim (337C)" <[email protected]> > Subject: [Beowulf] Good demo applications for small, slow cluster > To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > Message-ID: > <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > I'm looking for some simple demo applications for a small, very slow cluster > that would provide a good introduction to using message passing to implement > parallelism. > > The processors are quite limited in performance (maybe a few MFLOP), and > they can be arranged in a variety of topologies (shared bus, rings, > hypercube) with 3 network interfaces on each node. The processor to > processor link probably runs at about 1 Mbit/second, so sending 1 kByte takes > 8 milliseconds > > > So I'd like some computational problems that can be given as assignments on > this toy cluster, and someone can thrash through getting it to work, and in > the course of things, understand about things like bus contention, multihop > vs single hop paths, distributing data and collecting results, etc. > > There's things like N-body gravity simulations, parallelized FFTs, and so > forth. All of these would run faster in parallel than serially on one node, > and the performance should be strongly affected by the interconnect topology. > They also have real-world uses (so, while toys, they are representative of > what people really do with clusters) > > Since sending data takes milliseconds, it seems that computational chunks > which also take milliseconds is of the right scale. And, of course, we could > always slow down the communication, to look at the effect. > > There's no I/O on the nodes other than some LEDs, which could blink in > different colors to indicate what's going on in that node (e.g. > communicating, computing, waiting) > > Yes, this could all be done in simulation with virtual machines (and probably > cheaper), but it's more visceral and tactile if you're physically connecting > and disconnecting cables between nodes, and it's learning about error > behaviors and such that's what I'm getting at. > > Kind of like doing biology dissection, physics lab or chem lab for real, as > opposed to simulation. You want the experience of "oops, I connected the > cables in the wrong order" > > Jim Lux > _______________________________________________ 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
