Software Preparation

High Level Goals

• Ensure scalability on 24 nodes

• Try to eliminate known bugs

• Faster program startup

• Better process management

• Better monitor management

• Activity logging and error reporting

• Avoid heavy engineering

What do we really want to show?

• Our usual application demo suit– 2D, 3D, video, windowing system

• Input mechanism– can we get hand recognition to work?– Multi-input routing

• Display nodes management– keyboard/mouse, process creation/destruction– logging

Applications

• Image Viewer (1 person 2 days)– make sure it does scaling internally– eliminate that bug– timing may change due to network latency

• OpenGL (1 person a few days)– test on 24 nodes

• Walk-through: needs faster load time

• Iso-surface demo (on-going)

Low-level System Support

• Communication (1 person 3 days)– VMMC running for 24 nodes– Ethernet-based barrier may need tuning

• File System (on-going)– broadcast-based collective IO

• Program Synchronization(on-going)– a few OpenGL and walkthrough demos– iso-surface demo

Input Mechanism

• We really need something cool– multi-input routing (1 person 1 week)

• Hand recognition (2 people 2 weeks)– need a few reflective strips– more cameras and PCs

• Voice recognition (1 person, 1/2 week)– works, but needs a better message protocol

Display Management

• Put everything into one program• Faster process creation

– tree-based broadcast (1 person 1 day)

• Keyboard-mouse server– cut/paste existing code (1 person 1-2 days)

• Information logging– need a standard message format– program write to stdout

Information Logging

• Motivation– error reporting, debug information– user study (Morrow Pettigrew)

• Logging data path: (1 person, 2 days)– program => stdout => process server => disk– may need a globally synchronized clock

• serialize events

A Plan

• 24-node cluster ready (1st week April)– triple-boot: NT 4.0, NT 2000, Linux

• we can get Vijay, need a supervisor

• Test VMMC on NT 2000 (April 15)

• Software tests by the end 3rd week of April