[parisc-linux] 'foreign' PCI cards in an rp2430

Carlos O'Donell Jr. carlos@baldric.uwo.ca
Sat, 9 Mar 2002 11:41:13 -0500


> 
> > Have you tried begging, trading, or buying some cycles on a 
> > Superdome with some 100GBs of RAM instead of waiting for 
> > weeks to see your jobs run to completion?
> 
> Really, my code should be pretty efficient (it takes weeks to run anyway
> ;) with the setup I've described above, but the killer is: I'm a
> University student ("I knew it!" I hear you all say ;) and as such, my
> code is perpetually in the "hmm, I wonder what'd happen if.." state. So
> "some cycles" would become "some more cycles" faster than you could say
> "where's all my RAM gone?!"
> 
> 	Duraid
>

This is a very similar problem that we had when calculating prime
alternating knots[1]. Essentially what was done was to use MPI[2] 
and a fast network connection, such that you could have _other_ 
computers holding data in RAM/SWAP.

Parallelize parallelize parallelize.

It's really easy to learn MPI and it's great for those big problems
that you may not be able to do with a 64-bit box :)

a. Get a 100MBit/1GBit switch and NIC's.
b. Get some more boxes (borrow/lie/cheat/steal)
c. Tie them together.

This is what I do for a hobby :) ... and yes I'm a student aswell.
It's nice to see that people like Bell and Nortel are willing to 
donate expensive gear for projects like yours or mine[3] :)

c. 

[1] http://baldric.uwo.ca/article.php3?section=baldric&article=knots
[2] http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/
[2] http://www.lam-mpi.org/
[3] http://www.baldric.uwo.ca/~carlos/pdisplay.html