Examples of parallel computing

[Radoslaw_Jedynak]

I teach students of maths how to use some mathematics applications. The main program of course is Mathematica. I would like to show in the end of this term some examples with parallel computing. I would be very glad if someone tells me what examples will be the best to show the idea of these operations, their useful for them.

[Kelvin_Mischo]

You might want to take a look at this video that I created recently that covers the basics of parallel computing.
http://www.wolfram.com/broadcast/screen ... abilities/

The first example shows how to find Mersenne primes in a large list (and how to use multiple machines or cores to find them more quickly).

The last example uses differential equations to make a nice animation.

So you hope these are either interesting ideas, or naturally lead you to interesting ideas. Definitely post what you settle on for examples, I'm sure we'd all be curious to hear what you find most interesting for student projects.

Kelvin

[Radoslaw_Jedynak]

Thanks Kelvin for your answer. The presentation is very interesting. I think that some of examples I try to adopt for my lecture. I think also about algebra tasks, for example linear systems.

I have one question. Is it difficult to create cluster from about 10 computers (“old” with one core). What I need to install on each computer and on “server”. How can I simply test the powerful of this HPC cluster?

Radek

[Kelvin_Mischo]

Hi Radek,

I apologize, it's been too long since I've been back to this forum!

The short answer to your question is that it is very easy to create ad-hoc clusters, in other words, clusters made up of computer lab machines or other machines in the department (even mixed platforms).

In terms of licensing, if you have a site license already, this might be quite easy (you could draw from the pool of licenses that you already have), or it might make sense to add a few extra licenses for this purpose. We have all sorts of bundles to give you nice pricing as needed.

I'll have someone get in touch with you about details who can look up your type of site license and recommend a way to test this...we could probably help you set up trial licenses as well if that would be useful.

thanks! Kelvin

[Justin_Smith]

Thanks Kelvin for your answer. The presentation is very interesting. I think that some of examples I try to adopt for my lecture. I think also about algebra tasks, for example linear systems.

I have one question. Is it difficult to create cluster from about 10 computers (“old” with one core). What I need to install on each computer and on “server”. How can I simply test the powerful of this HPC cluster?

Radek

Lightweight grid manager makes this very simple, you may want to look into using that.