@Illumio:
Yesh. it may get more diabolical soon. It's an odd cluster as it is, but I may be adding a netbook to it soon! O.o As it is my laptop is how I log into the cluster to do work on it. I can access each node with SSH and do installs and everything while laying in bed lololol. I set myself up for laziness. Gets more done sometimes, because I don't have to get up and scoot off the bed to work on the cluster. That was such a hassle! haha.

In all reality it was though, because I only have one kvm with two port sets on it, so I could only switch two units back and forth at the terminal easily, that's why there were so many keyboards. I did a little more work on this today and verified that my work units are getting worked on correctly, turns out 3 of the units were experiencing problems. My new stats should show up in a week or two when the units have finished enough work and the servers at stanford update.

Here's the stats link for the cluster on stanford's servers.

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=213973

This data will change every day. I have a desktop (my dad's) in the floor below me running a client on his GPU. It gets work units done MUCH faster than any of the units in this cluster. I'm not even sure if my cluster as a whole will outperform it honestly. These units are pretty old. I also haven't figured out a way to benchmark the system yet.

I'll let you all know what the final word is about processing power when the system is finally benchmarked though.

@annoyingcalc: Yes it was quite fortuitous to be able to do those things. I had to do a ton of work to get where I was though, french classes every year since the 6th grade without a gap but once in my freshman year of highschool. I'm not currently taking any french classes but I've been studying forever. I only ended up going because I just so happened to have made a good deal of money building a website, and I had run out of french classes at my community college. So I took the last thing they offered in french, which was the study abroad.

@Juju: We'll see if I can make it happen, but rest assured I'm trying my best!

It's really good to talk to you all again, I've missed you guys. It's really cool that you all were so quick to give me a warm welcome back. That's one of the things I love about this community. You don't get this kind of thing everywhere on the internet. Lots of things are exclusive and require a lot of rites of passage to get into. The calculator community has proven to be the most open programming community I've run into. I really hope that never changes.

Thanks to everyone for the warm welcome back!

I'm setting it up to run the Folding@Home project for the most part, since I won't be using it myself all the time. Aside from that, when I am using it, I'm planning on writing a 3d rendering engine for OpenMPI and trying out some fun stuff there. It'll have to be in C or C++ so it can be portable to other Beowulf clusters.

OpenMPI is a Message Passing Interface, it sends parts of a large task to the units, and all the units crunch the numbers, then the nodes give their parts back to the head unit through the network. It's basically parallel processing, but on a larger scale than inside a multicore processor. Each node has it's own ram, gpu, etc, so there's a lot more to work with than a multicore cpu.

here's the wiki on what a cluster is and can do:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster

I am not well versed enough to tell you everything they are capable of or what the kind of power is in one of these things. I'm trying to figure out how to benchmark my system at the moment, and finish the OpenMPI setup. It's quite tricky when you don't know enough about Linux or networking in general. :p

I've started a little project in my home, it's a Debian 6 (squeeze) based Beowulf cluster! From donated and unused desktops I've made what is more or less just a small LAN network right now with partial Beowulf setup implemented. I'm still working on the OpenMPI stuff. As it is right now, I've got them all running Stanford's Folding at Home, getting mucho work units done 24/7.

If you would like to assist me and know anything about clustering or Linux in general, I'm still kind of a noob at this and could use the help. I may post questions here for that reason, if anyone can help me, a bunch of calc programmers will probably have the answer if I can't find it on my own!

Thanks in advance to anyone who helps me with the project.

English: Advanced
French: Intermediate-Advanced

I read and listen much better in french than I speak it.

It could be that some of the code was dependent on settings in the calc somehow, like going from radians to degrees with trig functions or something of the sort. I don't know what else would have changed if you did not alter the code and the calc did not receive some interference from another program on it.

Thanks guys :-)

Next up on the list is more storyline, maybe some more boobytraps and a few tasks for certain levels so that there's more to do than just killing scifi characters, as fun as that may be.

jsj795, there's an alpha already out, it's only got a couple of levels and no energy cannon, but you can goof around with it. here's the forum link where it is. http://tifreakware.ath.cx/index.php?showtopic=1042&st=420 it's somewhere down in the posts, and you also need the HW3Patch if you are using an 89 titanium edition, which there's a link for on the next page

Bon chance avec ce jeu, ce ressemble à un bon projet. Je ne peux pas attendre de voir de plus.