Sorts in general.. Good idea. Yes, we'll do a distributed computing bubble sort.
Interesting, though.. There are probably simple algorithms which are efficient in a single processor environment, but become egregiously inefficient when distributed. Jim On 8/20/13 12:11 PM, "Max R. Dechantsreiter" <[email protected]> wrote: >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 _______________________________________________ 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
