undergrad senior project idea, help

[Donald Becker]

On 28 Aug 2002, Dean Johnson wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 21:43, Matt Osborne wrote:
> > For my project I had the idea of building a beowulf with linux for
> > my school. My problem is understanding what applications/uses for the
> > school that the beowulf will bring.. I trying to get it together so
> > that I can explain to the school what will be the result besides a
> > cool machine! thanks Matt
> 
> An easy demonstration of clustering technology, easily understandable by
> non-geeks, would be running something like pvm-povray to do some groovy
> graphics.

PoVray was on the first Extreme.Linux CD many years ago.  It's a great
visual example of cluster speed-up.

This subject came up at lunch today, as it often does around here.  It
was suggested that Blender (see the recent open-sourcing news) would
make an excellent demo.


> Another example that is a little more complex and will glaze over even
> the most hearty viewer, would be to run some molecular dynamics codes
> like NAMD (from UIUC) and then make pretty pictures with VMD (also from
> UIUC). There are plenty of example molecules, so you don't really have
> to get into that. NAMD shows very nice scaling on clusters, so you can
> generate a nice graph that will show the value of clustering.

We put NAMD/VMD on our "BAT CD" (Beowulf Applications and Tools), the
first version of which we showed at LinuxWorld.  VMD makes a great
visual demo, and it's doing real, physical science.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993