On Thu, 8 Mar 2012, Mark Hahn wrote: > > Any more bizarre than a cluster of Furbies? Or PS/2s, or any other weird > > hardware. > > well, playstations had cell chips, which were, in their day, pretty > respectable. to me, that's pure beowulf, in the classic sense. > > clustering very light-weight machines is sort of amusing, but it's hard > to imagine a less appropriate substrate than an iPad. completely mundane > hardware, extremely expensive display and touch panel, slow, small memory, > no ethernet.
I remember, some (ten?) years ago on this list, there was an article about making a cluster of Compaq Ipaqs PDAs. Those particular models only had serial port and IR, so the author(s) went infrared. The performance of them was dog ugly, AFAIR, compared to what I could do with one iPaq with Linux and Python program doing similar stuff (prime sieve). I remember iPaqs were at that time touted as would be student's digital assistants, were to be introduced into US schools etc etc. Strange, seems like history repeats itself. Am I a digital prophet? Is Apple going to be bought by HP? :-) > OK, I did think of a way that would be pretty cool in a demo/kluge, > almost performance-art way: have the iPads communicate > by modulating their LCD, and receiving via the screen-side camera. > I didn't say it was practical ;) > > it would be hillarious to see a ring of ipads flashing QR codes at each other > while running linpack. well, to me at least! > > anyone want to donate a pile of iPads? actually, a pile of android tabs > would be even better, since you can put a decent/open dev env on them. Extremely cool idea. How about stacking them all against a huge mirror? Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
