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[PLUG] Distributed Projects & Clusters
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Greetings,
Okay, the recent post about SETI@home has brought up one of my favorite
topics...
that of distributed projects/clustered and distributed computing...
As far as my experience with the projects.. my opinions follow:
Most of my experience with RUNNING distributed projects falls into
the realm of Windows based machines, but I have run them on *NIX
machines too.
As far as the projects go, I have run more SETI@home -- and gotten it
installed on friend's systems... it's good eyecandy to watch, well, it
gets boring to look at... but it's better than running a regular screen
saver.. I've run SETI@home on Windows & *NIX machines... What I DONT like
about SETI@home -- they've refused to open up their code, even under NDA
to people who were willing to, and offering to optimize the code so that
it would run better and faster, in general and/or to take advantage of
instruction sets, of say AMD processors, and 3dnow type stuff. They didnt
want to do this when offered, possibly because they were afraid to run out
of data for people to process (when they've already been many months
behind) or because they felt they couldnt deal with all the data coming
in. It was suggested that if this was a problem, that they could simply
look for additional data (process the data more, in different ways to find
what they're looking for) they refused this, and yet now they're saying
they're going to do this (look at the data in more ways, not neccessarily
to optimize the code, or open it) for version 3 of the SETI@home client.
The fact of the matter is, that they have (and I have) run the client 24/7
at times, keeping systems on, and burning electricity, when they didnt
need to, if the client could be optimized to run better.
A little after all this happened, I basically got to a point where I could
not increase my percentage -- that is, I could not get beyond having done
more work units than 87% of the people who are part of the project. (Right
now, I am at about 84%, because all but my parent's system have stopped
doing units for me, and my parent's system is not on full-time.)
At about this time, or a little before, at least, I got into GIMPS..
I've run Distributed.net's client... I ran it on a fast 486 and a slow
586... I felt it was too slow -- didnt seem to be producing many results
at the time -- and it certainly wasn't much to look at -- plus, you
couldnt REALLY run SETI@home AND distributed.net. Plus, as much as I feel
that proving that certain encryption techniques are jokes, I figure just
about any encryption technique could be brute-forced with enough time and
enough computing power.
I personally _really_ like GIMPS - the Great Internet Mersenne Prime
Search.. that is.. at least, it is mathematical work, and the fruits of
it, will, and may be helpful in many ways to many different types of
projects. ALso what I *really* like about GIMPS is that every computer I
have run it on, I have noticed NO slowdown in the computer's performance.
You can also run GIMPS full time, AND run SETI@home as a screen saver.
When SETI@home runs, however, it will slow down GIMPS majorly. However,
if you are only running SETI@home as a screen saver, then GIMPS runs all
other times, when you are actually using your computer. SETI@home run
all the time, in my opinion produces a noteable slowdown on your computer,
so it is not an option to run it full-time.
Anyways, I don't have much to say about it right now... but as I posted
before, I did create a SETI@home group for PLUG: P.L.U.G.
and I just created a Distributed.net rc-5 team for plug:
To join the team, you can use the following link. This link will
require you to know your email address and your participant password.
http://stats.distributed.net/pjointeam.php3?team=35018216
I also created a dcypher.net team for PLUG - group ID 602
dcypher.net is running some interesting stuff.. right now just a gamma
flux project that used to be a java app at http://supercomputer.i.am [I
thought it was cool as a java app, and wish it would be restored soon.]
So thats it for now.
______________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group - http://plug.nothinbut.net
Announcements - http://lists.nothinbut.net/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion - http://lists.nothinbut.net/mail/listinfo/plug
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