[Beowulf] Quasi-Non-Von-Neumann hardware in a Beowulf cluster.

[Andrew Shewmaker]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:57:29 -0500, Joe Landman
<landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:

> I think the physics chip in hardware is a neat idea, though I think you
> need a high level interface to it, open standards, and lots of support
> to make it work.  Moreover, it needs to be programmable: not because
> physics changes so often, but because the implied models may differ from
> what you want.

I was interested in whether they were supporting Linux with their SDK [1].  
Here's what I found:  

Their SDK is unsurprisingly MS centric, but it is built on something called the 
Open Dynamics Framework [2].  They don't have a Linux/OpenGL port yet, 
but it looks like they have been designing it so they easily can, and they say 
they probably will in the future.  They are using C++ and provide Lua bindings 
for rapid prototyping.  Their PSCL (Physics Scripting Language) documentation 
references the ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) [3], but I'm not quite sure how 
they fit together other than they collaborated on PSCL.  It looks like ODE does 
currently run on Linux.

[1] http://www.ageia.com/novodex_downloads.html
[2] http://physicstools.org/forum1/
[3] http://ode.org/

-- 
Andrew Shewmaker