[linux-audio-user] Re: slightly OT: supercomputer music

[Loki Davison]

On 3/8/06, Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 06:30:14PM +1100, Loki Davison wrote:
>
> > physical modeling. It still chews TONS of cpu. However, supercomputer
> > means non-realtime music (realtime and mpi? i don't think so.) and you
> > can do physical modeling offline fine on a normal machine. So well,
> > not very much.
>
> There is more than MPI for super computing though.  There are still
> vector machines, and there are still NUMA style machines like Origins,
> Altixs, or those large POWER or SPARC machines.  I don't know that any
> of those are suitable for realtime either, but unless the answer is
> already known, they would be fun to explore for such purposes.

Well, think about the name NUMA. If you don't have a deterministic
memory access time then realtime is somewhat difficult.

>
> Also, I wonder about clusters that don't use MPI.  I seem to recall an
> organ system that used a cluster of PCs for physical modelling.  Does
> anyone know how the different nodes communicated?  I think it might have
> been something like master->node->audio output, where each node only
> modelled the pipes that it was responsible for outputing.

i'd guess so, so not really programmed as a cluster but more in an osc style.

>
> --
> Joshua D. Boyd
> jdboyd at jdboyd.net
> http://www.jdboyd.net/
> http://www.joshuaboyd.org/
>