What if one of the committees were to put together a really powerful computer? What would you use it for? Do you have something that could use unusual processing power?
My questions are general, but the machine components would vary, depending on the type of task. I would like to know if Science Committee might be able to offer something useful in this direction.
I wouldn’t think a really power machine would be particularly useful until the membership developed the skills to make use of such machines. And when they have the skills, the most cost effective means of obtaining power is to use cloud based platforms such as those available from Amazon.
For training and learning the techniques I highly recommend a Raspberry Pi based system. Its cheap, scaleable, and there are online step-by-step instructions for the assembly of the system. Perhaps the best ‘problem’ to learn with is the solutions for a mandelbrot set. It lends itself very well to parallel processing. Produces geat looking visual imagery (exciting reseult), and scales nearly perfectly.
That raises a number of questions in my mind. First, do you use Amazon’s service in your work (or, anywhere else)? If Amazon’s service is effective, perhaps people should just buy a thin client of some sort and a big Internet connection? I would have privacy concerns for my own stuff, but if I’m just experimenting, that isn’t such a big concern.
Well Said!!! I 100% agree
For those wishing to learn how to create mathematical models (computer models) of things the single best book I have ever found to introduce the subject is How to Model It It seems that it is available used from Amazon for about a $1.
It is written in laymen’s language with a minimum of math needed to follow along with it.
FYI Netflix is hosted on Amazon I bet it’s a safe bet a majority of people at DMS have Netflix
Thanks for the info. However, I wouldn’t regard Netflix as processing-intensive. It’s mostly about feeding large quantities of data, rather than doing anything with the data. In fact, YouTube has better navigation tools in their videos.
Generally the models I work on are produced for Government agencies, and only get run a handful of times each year, since the remainder of the year is spent analysing the results to understand what they mean. As such the old model of purchasing computer equipment to run the models has proved to be less then idea from a financial point of view But while there are some issues with cloud based computational nodes, they do work surprisingly well.
The thing to take away from this, though, is that as the models become more complex, and hence need greater computational power, the length of time for a person to process the results effectively goes up tremendously. And the cost to validate / calibrate the model so that it provides valid results (or something approximating valid in most cases 
) goes up considerably.
So I guess what I am saying is that I suggest Science focus on teaching the basics of modelling and parallel programming (if at all) and expect members who have need for sophisticated or powerful computation platforms to provide their own. Much like we expect members to provide their own tooling in specialized areas that wouldn’t have much general use.
That’s a great idea! I wonder who we have who would be knowledgeable in that area and could teach some classes… ?
I take the hint! However, while this is one ‘science’ area I would feel comfortable that I am knowledgeable enough to teach it, I make a living (semi-retired) doing peer reviews of these things now. In other words it isn’t something I have any ‘fun’ with (indeed it is a major source of my stress), so I would find it really hard to motivate myself to take the lead on the subject. But I would be willing to help out if someone else was willing to take the lead.
Much like my teaching of the Bridgeport 101 course, the person ‘teaching’ this subject doesn’t need to have much knowledge/experience in the area, just a willingness to take the lead and the passion to do so.
I’d be happy to be the talking head for the class. I like teaching classes. I just don’t know enough about this topic to give a good presentation and, especially, to answer any questions.
I use Amazon (AWS) to manage animefest.org and several other sites. I am currently using their EC2 (virtual machines), RDS (database; mysql), SES (email service for bulk email), and Route53 (DNS). I regularly go to Amazon’s Re-invent conference (I’m going this fall).
I went from a computer cabinet with several rack mount computers in my home office, to dedicated servers in a colocation datacenter, to cloud hosting. Now, I cannot imagine why anyone would want to build and maintain a server themselves.
I would be happy to give a deep dive into the way AWS works and show how I’m using it.
-Robert
Richard,
Do you have a kindle or a computer you could install the kindle pc software on? If you like, I can loan (through Amazon) this book and my four node raspberry pi cluster (self contained box). There are several examples in the book on how to create basic parallel programs including an basic example on the Mandelbrot set if I remember correctly. This should get you started, and I am more then willing to answer questions as you proceed. As for questions that arrise from the class, that is the wonderful thing about science. It is about the process of answering those questions for oneself. As I said, I am glad to provide some assistance, but this is an area where hands on experimentation is both easy (compile, run, test) and very effective at self teaching. So I would envision a workshop with a small number of students (say 4) all working on the application together. That way you don’t need to worry about having all of the answers.
The book shows how to set-up the compute nodes, and you can use my prebuilt nodes as well. It is only a matter of switching out the SD cards, though I would suggest doing that with an additional pi… since my box wasn’t really set-up for frequent disassembly (which is needed to switch cards)…
That would be great! We could offer end-to-end instruction in setting up your own high-tech modeling platform in the cloud! You know, in case you ever need to simulate drug interactions using your own DNA or something…
Although I can see the usefulness of cloud hosting, I still believe that having a powerful PC locally is a good idea, and I do not trust the security or availability of cloud services for critical applications. I wouldn’t say that Science Committee has such critical applications in the foreseeable future, so that doesn’t matter so much.
If anyone is interested, I do modeling of fluid dynamics and heat transfer and would be willing to teach usage of the software and modeling methods.
That should be really useful to several of the members at DMS, from those in Automotive to those in Electronics.
What kind of materials would you need to teach this class?
@wandrson I don’t know much about the Kindle software; can it install on Win 7? I could install it at home.
It sounds, though, like I would have to invest significant time into learning enough to begin putting together a class. I’m not sure that I could get to it before late July or August.
I think that would be awesome. Can it be done on the CAD/CAM PC?
Pretty much just a Linux box (VM would work too). It doesn’t even have to be very powerful since we wouldn’t be modelling anything too crazy.