So, I’ve had some ups and downs in the 2 weeks since school ended. I’ll be focusing on one particular thing, which is the distributed computing cluster me and a friend set up to crunch through solutions to the optimization problem I’ve been looking at.

Well, you may be thinking, you have a computing cluster? In that case, man, you’ve got it made! The sky’s the limit when you’ve got a computing cluster! Well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but having a whole lot of computing power behind you makes solving certain problems easier or just plain out possible. In this case, having a bunch of cpu time crunching on this optimization problem makes it tangible study in depth.

So, a certain very good friend of mine heard that I was looking for computing time, and since he worked for a branch of his university’s IT department, he knew that a certain computer lab would go unused for most of the summer. So I whipped up some customized live cd’s that would be devoted to solving these problems, along with a distributed computing system to tie everything together (part of why I got this domain in short notice) and we filled up the lab with systems running off the live cds. For a few short glorious days, I had over 100 cores crunching numbers for me: it’s a great feeling to wake up and have a job that would’ve taken a month with one dual core computer finish overnight.

Then, some of the other IT guys stumbled into the lab looking to play some games, and failing to closely read the friendly note I had left on every computer in the lab, proceeded to freak out and raise a pretty good shit storm over it. Looking back, we could’ve prepared better for this, by at least telling the IT people with access to the closed down lab that we were up to something in there. In our defense, though, we didn’t think that people would be dumb enough to freak out about it (which was a mistake on our part: sometimes, you just have to assume that people are insane. To be honest, I’m glad I’m learning it now rather than later). At one point we were afraid that my friend would get fired, but all they did was close down the majority of the cluster, and now I’m back to having some 20 odd cores at my disposal. It’ll get done eventually, but it’ll take a bit longer.

So what’s the point of this little story, other than you should prepare for unforeseen consequences? There isn’t one, but it got me thinking about something that I’ve been wondering about. Your usual university might have a dedicated research cluster, but most of the smaller ones don’t have a one. However, all universities (the ones I’m familiar with, at any rate) have at least a few computer labs, all with non-ancient hardware. Most people use those computers at sane hours, or if at insane hours, then they’re usually there by the time insane hours start.

I’ve never gotten why no one has tried to tie together all the labs as a giant cluster, but one that only functions at night. If there aren’t any jobs, then the cluster shuts down like it’s supposed to: if there are jobs, then they crunch through them until it’s time for the lab to open, and then the cluster shuts down and becomes a normal terminal-ish thing. That way, smaller universities have an appreciable amount of computing power on hand, in house. That would be cool.

There’s plenty of  objections to this sort of scheme, with security, cost, and maintenance topping the list of concerns that I can make off the top of my head. However, so far, it’s just an idea I’m tossing out there, mind candy to kick around and think about when you can’t sleep. Like all the other ideas bouncing around in my head, we’ll see where it goes.

So, I utterly fail at keeping my blog up to date over the time period when I had a decent amount of time. My break mostly consisted of either hacking on the bottleneck assignment problem solver (I’ve transitioned to a C++ based one from Python), trying to get my newly minted academic application system framework to a version 0.1, sleeping, and slacking off. The time off was nice, but I need more of it without the drop in productivity that comes with going home.

In other news, I’ll be trying to clear out my old draft posts, update my zenphoto to include various reprap photos (soldered up 12 opto endstops yesterday: just need to pump out some 46 aluminum parts in a month), and finish this E/M take home test. I’ll be around.

So I didn’t get around to updating last night before going to bed at 3:30, but I’m getting around to it now. You should notice the site overhaul: I still have a garish gimp flame-plugin thing, but I needed some green, and making something by hand just wasn’t working out. The color scheme is based on brown, just because it is? I tried it out, and it worked, so I ran with it. Also, I brought back the side bar.

More important news: it is spring break for me! It’s partly why I spent an afternoon screwing around with my blog style, and I hope that I’ll get a load of things done this week ‘round. As I said before, I’ll hope to grab pretty much everything else that I’ll need to finish the reprap before the heat death of the universe, and if certain professors are around, I’ll stick around and cut some more parts. That in itself would be a pretty good use of my break, but I’ll also be looking at describing and improving my algorithm for the BAP problem I’ve been talking about: keeping people in the dark about what I’m talking about is no fun. I’ll also clear out my old list of draft posts, make up/set up an image manager that isn’t crappy, and work on EZLO. On top of this, I do need to finish the homework profs have assigned over the break, finish applying to REUs, and save the world. Oh, and anim3 needs some serious work.

Well, I think it’s about time to get started on these things. Stay tuned.

Well!

Today, I’ve touched on cython, python profiling, and numpy. Guess who’s wrangling with number intensive code? I’m still working on the bap problem, although I’ve gotten it speedier: not quite speedy enough, though. The guys from 40 years ago are probably still beating me. Hopefully, I have time to write this up so everyone is a bit less confused, although this is unlikely.

Things to do:

• Homework up the wazzoo!
• Reprap research: round out what we need in terms of electronics, and what we need, period.

Hi. The MCM starts in 2 days.

I have to finish a paper and a bunch of lab questions before then, and I want to do at least one run through with my talk on maglev trains (as well as hacking S5 to auto-advance ala ignite), run at least one reprap part into existence, find if we can do etching cheaply, start the E/M test, and talk to a prof about what sort of equation I should use in a feedback loop.

Whew.

So with all of this to do, I took 3.5 hours off and coded up a framework for a problem posed by my prof that could have been a potential summer research topic: looking at the bottleneck assignment problem, what’s the relationship of n and the probability distribution used to assign weights to the assignments? If you are terribly lost, and I manage to do some work on this after the MCM, then I’ll post an update. Point is, I’m code deprived or something, and I just finished something I thought would take me at least a week, which shows me just how good my estimation abilities are (off).

And updating wordpress isn’t such a lark: I gotta do backups? Hell, gotta wrap this stuff up into a script