[Beowulf] $2500 cluster. What it's good for?

[Jim Lux]

Here's an intriguing possibility for use on a cheap cluster:
http://simulationresearch.lbl.gov/GO/

Genopt is a generic optimization program.  It invokes an external program 
to evaluate the cost function, and implements a variety of ways to do the 
optimization. Some of these might very amenable to EP execution on a 
cluster. (Particle Swarm and Pattern Search for instance).

Some sort of GA might also be a good fit to a cluster.

Genopt is fairly non-optimized. It spits out a text file to your 
evaluation/simulation program, then it reads the text file generated by the 
evalutor to extract the cost.  It's more of an optmizer wrapper around some 
other tool.



James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875