Apps & Design

[jok707s at mail.smsu.edu]

Several questions:

1.  What kind of work has been done in applying Beowulf to machine 
translation?  Would parallelism help when trying to translate several texts 
into several different languages in the shortest possible time?  Can existing 
web-based translation systems (Systran, InterTran, &c) be parallelised?

2.  Have the graphics folks in Hollywood experimented with Beowulfery as a 
possible addition to &/or replacement of their traditional machines for making 
digital images in movies?  Would Pixar and that gang be able to accomplish 
more in some situations with Beowulfs than they can with the SGIs, Suns, &c?

3a. Has anyone successfully assembled a completely wireless Beowulf with all 
of the nodes and the server connected to each other only by radio (or maybe 
infrared)?  Could this be done with cellular technology?

3b. If a wireless Beowulf can be made to work at all, would it be possible for 
its performance to get into the general area of the wired versions using 
technology available in the foreseeable future?

3c. If a wireless Beowulf were constructed entirely from laptops (including 
the server), could one have a "virtual" Beowulf with the individual nodes 
moving around while the system as a whole continued to function?  How much 
would performance degrade as the nodes got farther apart?  What would be the 
distance limits beyond which the system would fail completely?  How much 
difference would be made by the application(s) that were being run?

This should keep people emailing for a while?  :-)

Joel