source code: master, slave
The last project had us nearly in tears. To wait 45 minutes for a picture every time we needed to test the program required the patience of a saint. Unfortunately, we are very impatient. We were ready to give up on further studies when we were introduced to PVM.
PVM, or Parallel Virtual Machine, is a free parallel processing environment developed at MIT which lets you spread the heavy processing in a program amoung multiple computers. There are basically two parts to a PVM program, the master program and the slave program. The master program coordinates the transmissions of data to and from the slaves then displays it. The slaves do all the dirty work, processing mountains of data.
We changed our trajectory simulation program to work with PVM. The master program sends each slave a column of data for them to work on and they send their results back to the master, which then displays it. The picture below took about 15 minutes, running on four computers. You probably noticed that not all the pixels are there. Why aren't they there? Well, no one we know has been able to figure it out.