Grid Computing in Action!

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or people who want to see some "grid computing in action," here's a quick video:

The video below shows a grid computing race: on the left, you'll see a calculation of a portion of a Mandelbrot set in real time on my machine. On the right, you'll see the exact same code executing on a testbed of fivenine machines.

Update 2006-09-20 10:24: Changing video to one with narration.


It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that fivenine machines are much, much faster than one.

How easy was this? I simply wrote a class that could calculate a portion of the Mandelbrot set. On the left side, I started a thread that called that class 25 times in succession (iterating over the coordinates for this graph). On the right side, I iterated over the coordinates and created 25 instances of my class, then shipped those off to the Digipede Network.

Before my local thread can even complete one calculation, the grid has returned a bunch of calcs (the black squares take the longest--that's why the bright ones get returned so much faster). In the end, the 59 machines finished in 15 seconds, and my local machine took over a minute.

I may produce a bunch of these videos. It's pretty quick and easy with SnagIt and YouTube (and, yes, as soon as I get into the SoapBox beta, I'll use it).

Technorati tags: grid computing, digipede