hemsing.html

from Los Alamos Middle School, Los Alamos, New Mexico, writes:

I am in the 8th grade and I participated in the local county Science Fair in the computer
science division.The judges for that category were from the IEEE computer chapter of
New Mexico and from the National Lab in Los Alamos. My Project Title was "Low
Cost Parallel Processing"

Using Macintosh Quadras and a few Power Macintoshes, several different clusters were
made to perform 2 different parallel processing tasks.

One of the tasks was "Parallel Fractal demo" written by students and a professor from UCLA.
This method used MacMPI on Ethernet AppleTalk and Applescripting. This task calculated
and displayed results from part of the Mandelbrot Set. This test showed that effective parallel
processing can be done on even slower macintoshes. Any number of nodes will work on this
task.

The next test, which I called "Counter," was developed specifically for this project. It was
written using Staz FutureBASIC II and Ethernet Appletalk. The program used File Sharing and
a shared memory on one of the nodes. The task was simply using a loop of 1,000,000 and
recording how long it took in ticks. When using 2 nodes, the loop was split in half (500,000 a
piece). Only 2 nodes work with this task. Nevertheless, this task ran nearly twice as fast on 2
nodes than it did on a single node.

This project took 1st place in its category and 1st place in special awards. The logo below is for
FutureBasic, which I used to write "Counter". Thanks for your help.

James Hemsing, xkeeper002@geocities.com

Good news, my project went to Regionals this past Saturday the 6th. I won 1st place in Computer
Science and won a cash award from IEEE.

update: June 7, 1999

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