[Beowulf] Good demo applications for small, slow cluster

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 08/21/2013 12:45 PM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
>> Sorts in general.. Good idea.
>>
>> Yes, we'll do a distributed computing bubble sort.
>>
>> Interesting, though.. There are probably simple algorithms which are
>> efficient in a single processor environment, but become egregiously
>> inefficient when distributed.
> e.g. The NAS parallel suite has an integer sort (IS) that is
> very latency sensitive.
>
> For demo purposes, nothing beats parallel rendering.
> There used to be a PVM and MPI POVRay packages
> that demonstrated faster completion times as more nodes were
> added.
>
Simple Mandelbrot fractal generation is good, too. I remember doing an 
MPI Mandelbrot fractal program as a student back in the day. It's really 
useful, because you can visually see the speed up as you add more cores.

A quick google of 'MPI Mandelbrot" showed many interesting hits on this 
topic.

Prentice