undergrad senior project idea, help

[Dean Johnson]

On Fri, 2002-09-06 at 15:04, Matt Osborne wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the details, really informative. Do you know of any easy way to
> measure or determine the power drawn by a system besides calculating each
> component's? 

I went to the local power company and they have a little meter device
that allows you to monitor the actual number of watts being consumed. If
you go this route, make sure you test it under a real load, as our
measured draw went up by like 25% when it started doing actual work.

> Also, I notice that you and Mark Hahn are from the Physics
> area. Is there a particular set of problems within Physics that you use
> for your Beowulf or a website that might have some info? I really enjoy
> working with the Physics dept. here so I thought I would ask.
> 

Check out NAMD at 

	http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/

It has some benchmarks and timings relative to "big iron". In
conjunction with that, pretty pictures can be created using

	http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/

Its kinda opaque for geeks, but there is enough docs to muddle through.

	-Dean