This term I'm taking a course in high-performance computing <http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall10/G22.2945-001/index.html>, and I have to pick a topic for a final project. According to the assignment <http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall10/G22.2945-001/final-project.pdf>, "The only real requirement is that it be something in parallel." In the class, we covered
* Microoptimization of single-threaded code (efficient use of CPU cache, etc.) * Multithreaded programming using OpenMP * GPU programming using OpenCL and will probably briefly cover distributed computing over multiple machines with MPI. I will have access to a high-performance cluster at NYU, including lots of CPU nodes and some high-end GPUs. Unlike most of the other people in the class, I don't have any interesting science projects I'm working on, so something useful to MediaWiki/Wikimedia/Wikipedia is my first thought. If anyone has any suggestions, please share. (If you have non-Wikimedia-related ones, I'd also be interested in hearing about them offlist.) They shouldn't be too ambitious, since I have to finish them in about a month, while doing work for three other courses and a bunch of other stuff. My first thought was to write a GPU program to crack MediaWiki password hashes as quickly as possible, then use what we've studied in class about GPU architecture to design a hash function that would be as slow as possible to crack on a GPU relative to its PHP execution speed, as Tim suggested a while back. However, maybe there's something more interesting I could do. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
