From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-01-25T04:16:39+09:00
Subject: Re: looking for an example problem to demonstrate TaskMaster

In article <12618.192.44.136.103.1011897768.squirrel@12.27.88.122>,
Jason Voegele <jason@jvoegele.com> wrote:
>> I'm looking for suggestions here...
>> 
>> I was thinking of an application where the user would enter a range of 
>> numbers to find primes in.  The script would break this range down into
>>  smaller ranges and use TaskMaster to send these tasks (finding primes 
>> withing the given subranges) to multiple client machines.  But that's
>> not  a real good demo since as the numbers in the ranges get larger the
>> time it  takes to test each number in the range goes way up (probably 
>> exponentially).  So I'm looking for a problem that's a bit more linear
>> so  that as you add more client machines it's obvious that the problem
>> is  solved faster. It should also be something pretty easy to
>> understand (and  program) since it's intended to be a demo.
>
>I've often considered a chess program that distributes different parts of 
>the game tree to different machines, thus allowing more depth of search in 
>some specified amount of time.  Chess may be too complex for your purposes, 
>but you could choose a simpler game.  Also, anything involving permutations 
>would make a good example.
>
>I presume you've already disregarded something like SETI@home as too 
>complex?

Yep.  Though, I think that TaskMaster would (with a few features I plan to 
add) be good for creating SETI@home type applications.

Phil