16 Nov
2011
16 Nov
'11
5:32 p.m.
At 16:47 -0600 11/15/11, Eric wrote:
In that timeframe I was using a single Motorola
DSP56001 to do
Mandelbrot set computations, and it was *much* faster than an array of
8051s. ... Originally I did this with a
386 PC, but later hooked it up to a Macintosh, and Dave Platt added
plugin support to MandelZot so I could use it without writing an entire
custom Macintosh application....
MandelZot - one of my favorite-ever applications, and Dave
Platt is one of my favorite-ever software authors (just for that
program). If you still talk to him, please send my regards and thanks!
I saw once, but don't have, a NeXTStep application which did
a side-by-side comparison of Mandelbrot set calculations on the 68030
(on the original Cube) and on the DSP56000 audio co-processor. The
DSP56000 was faster.
That application dropped off the NeXT radar when the newer
machines came out with the 68040, since that CPU was faster than the
DSP56000.
Personally, I think it would be awesome to resurrect that
code and get Distributed.net running on my NeXT's '040 and 56000
simultaneously, but have not managed to squeeze time into my schedule
to (learn how to and then) do that.
At 16:47 -0600 11/15/11, Ethan wrote:
...ISTR there's an expiry mechanism in the SETI at
Home client that
if you request a work unit and don't return it in a few days or weeks,
it's discarded. ... essentially it put a de facto lower bound on the
amount of CPU you could throw at the problem ...
AFAIK, Distributed.net doesn't have that feature since the
only problems they (currently) work on are very massively parallel:
http://www.distributed.net/
for details. Current clients for AmigaOS/68k and NeXTStep/68k (I'm
running it) exist, so that may give a de facto lower boundary for the
effective compute power an 1802 array would have to contribute, but
I'll go out on a limb and suggest you probably can contribute with
anything you can make run. Their *earliest* projected completion date
for any active project is 22-Jul-2015.
--
- Mark 210-379-4635
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