Re: haven't heard from Fermilab

Hi Paul,

Have you thought of distributed computing?

Your computation sounds ideal for the technique.

Write a little program that runs minimised as an icon.

Then you can click on it any time to start it, e.g.
if leaving the computer for a while, or if web browsing,
(which doesn't put much demand on a modern
p.c. most of the time, only on the connection).

Easiest is just to have it as a desktop shortcut, and when
you run it, the icon goes into the taskbar.

Then click to stop it when you need to get back to using
the computer.

Has to be able to instantly drop what it is doing and
save intermediate results to a file, and best
to save intermediate results regularly, say, every
few minutes, in case of crash or whatever.

But that shouldn't be too hard - just save variables,
arrays etc that it uses.

I've done a bit of that on my machine - just running
programs I downloaded from the internet for
a couple of distr. comp. projects that interested me.

Your project seems ideal for distributed computing
as anyone who took part could do a single point, and you'd
soon get a fair amount of data if you had enough
people involved.

It isn't much to ask of someone to run a program
while their computer is idle, and I for one will
be happy to do it.

Even when surfing the internet, one has lots of
idle time on the computer - e.g. when downloading
a file, the bottleneck is the connection, not the
speed of the computer.

Your program could run in the background at such times
and never be noticed (and wouldn't use anything
significant in resources either).

Unless it needs lots of memory, like megabytes of it.
That could make it less suitable for this approach.

But it's an idea anyway,...

Robert

Robert wrote,

>Write a little program that runs minimised as an icon.

That's where my knowledge falls short. I program in Matlab, and I don't have
the Matlab compiler (costs a thousand or two).

Great idea, though! Actually, if you want to volunteer, I can step you
through the details of the calculation, verify that you get the same results
as me for some simple case, and then we're off!