My favorite for lectures is PVMPOV. I haven't run it in 15 years, but the source is still out there.
PVMPOV will render a 3D image and let you observe the process realtime. The scene is split up in to N blocks of size M and distributed to P processes. Each process works on a single block at a time. Hard to render blocks take longer than easy blocks. And this is obvious as you watch it. Experiments you can do with this demo: 1. Make the block size very small 1x1 or 2x2, etc... this will smooth out the runtime for each block, but the overhead of orchestration and communications will slow you down. 2. Make the blocks really big, 64x64, 128x128, etc... this will reduce comm, but a single block could slow down the entire job. Too bad the code doesn't break down hard blocks by dynamically changing N and M. IIRC the Mandelbrot demo does--also another good visual demo you can run on a single laptop. 3. Try a different number of processes I like this demo because I can lecture on parallelism, efficiency of scale, inefficiencies of unbalanced or overly chatty decomposition. Limits to scale, etc... You can run this on your laptop with a single Linux VM. You can adjust the time of the demo based on the complexity of the scene and the target size, there are many freely available POV models. Lastly, PVM has fault recovery. If you like, kill a process while mid block. At the end, missing blocks will be re-rendered before end of job. This can lead to discussions about failures at scale and the importance of checkpointing and/or code that can recover. The last very large system I built had a conservative MTBF of 23 hours because of the volume of memory DIMMs (after a year of observation it was more like 48-72 hours). On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 3:52 AM, John Hearns <[email protected]> wrote: > I am giving an internal talk tomorrow, a lightweight introduction to HPC. > > > > Can anyone suggest any demonstrations of HPC which I could give – something > visual? > > Or are there any videos I could pick up from somewhere? > > > > I ahad thought on showing an H-bomb test video from Youtube, and saying > “Well, you aran’t allowed to do that any more” > > > ***********************************Viglen*********************************** > Viglen Ltd, Registered in England No 1208441. Registered Office: 7, Handley > Page Way, Colney Street, St. Albans, Hertfordshire AL2 2DQ. > > Information in this electronic mail message is confidential and may be > legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this > message by anyone else is unauthorised. If you are not the intended > recipient any use, disclosure, copying or distribution of this message is > prohibited and may be unlawful. When addressed to our customers, any > information contained in this message is subject to Viglen Terms & > Conditions. Please rely on your own virus checker and procedures with regard > to any attachment to this message. > ***********************************Viglen*********************************** > ______________________________________________________________________ > This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service. > For more information please visit http://www.symanteccloud.com > ______________________________________________________________________ > > _______________________________________________ > 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
