More power!

It has to be core 2 based, I would say...Probably a core 2 duo. Perhaps you could go with the dual core core 2 Extreme, but not the quad core, as that CPU alone is near 1500 USD.

Depending on what the set is, you might want to just buy a bunch of old computers from the thrift store and slap them on an openmosix grid. Did that with a bunch of thrift-store Mac G3s awhile ago.

If you work or are in school just use the computers at work or school during off peak hours. Overall I'm inclined to say you need to take a differant approach. Hours for an experiment is a bit extreme. Realistically if you're running for hours you're just doing the same thing over and over. What does hours versus minutes actually prove? That you're a glutten for punishment?

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Original post by Ravuya Depending on what the set is, you might want to just buy a bunch of old computers from the thrift store and slap them on an openmosix grid. Did that with a bunch of thrift-store Mac G3s awhile ago.

And how were the results?

Can I run a bunch of programs on an openmosix grid and have them all being processed at once? How hard is it to set up?

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Original post by LilBudyWizer If you work or are in school just use the computers at work or school during off peak hours. Overall I'm inclined to say you need to take a differant approach. Hours for an experiment is a bit extreme. Realistically if you're running for hours you're just doing the same thing over and over. What does hours versus minutes actually prove? That you're a glutten for punishment?

Optimization problems for many variables are difficult to solve. Each run of the program may only take 1/100th of a second, but thousands of tests have to be performed to find the average fitness of each set of parameters. Thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands or more) of those tests need to be performed to figure out the fitness landscape. That's just for one problem, when I fundamentally change the problem then I need to do all this over and over again. The more computing power I have, the faster I can produce results, or the more precise I can get my results. Also, with more computing power I can spend less time optimizing small parts of the problem. I also find it easier to learn about the nature of the problem through trial and error than figuring it all out in my head without experiments.

The budget PC idea sounds interesting, but I really want to find out the best deal in all for computing power vs price spent.

Oh, also, I don't have access to any large set of computers at school... but if I did, I wouldn't feel right setting up a large computer grid for myself without telling anyone... plus the risk of getting expelled. It would be fun, otherwise.

Any other ideas?

[Edited by - Senses777 on December 26, 2006 1:42:01 AM]

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Original post by Senses777 Can I run a bunch of programs on an openmosix grid and have them all being processed at once? How hard is it to set up?

You really should have your processes as threaded as possible, and it's not too hard to set up -- take a look at the site.

It does require having the "right" problem set though.

The results were pretty good; for the amount of money I paid, I probably would've leased less time on one of the grid machines here.

How about using your video card? It's a pain to program it, but if you take advantage of it properly, you can squeeze out quite a bit of processing power.

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Original post by DukeAtreides076 How about using your video card? It's a pain to program it, but if you take advantage of it properly, you can squeeze out quite a bit of processing power.

I've thought about this and researched it a bit, but the effort required to get programs running on the vid card doesn't look worth it to me.

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You really should have your processes as threaded as possible

What would be the advantage of running a multi-threaded process over running many processes?

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Original post by Senses777 Quote: Original post by DukeAtreides076 How about using your video card? It's a pain to program it, but if you take advantage of it properly, you can squeeze out quite a bit of processing power. I've thought about this and researched it a bit, but the effort required to get programs running on the vid card doesn't look worth it to me. Quote: You really should have your processes as threaded as possible What would be the advantage of running a multi-threaded process over running many processes?

You can run multiple process...nothing wrong with that. OpenMosix makes your set of computers into one large SMP machine...I think each thread will go to a single node (core) if you don't worry about threading your app, which is in many instances, quite acceptable.

If you can run many instances of your program, it may be beneficial to just get the small computers without messing with openMosix. Just set them up via ssh and run.