Kelledin
Distinguished
My O/S is Linux From Scratch, kernel 2.4.5, with 512MB RAM. gcc version used was gcc-2.95.3 with Athlon optimization patches (though it shouldn't compile for an Athlon in this case, it should compile for i386).
RAM shouldn't make a difference; this thing should fit easily in <1MB, no matter how large your counter gets. Even if it's computing the series by which it gets the square-root result in software, it doesn't have to hold all elements of the series at one time.
Also, this test doesn't actually spawn off separate child processes. That's what clusters excel at--tasks that end up spawning off many independent threads of execution to do work in parallel (i.e. neural nets and the like). It's likely that the process in its entirety got executed on one node of your cluster.
As for the difference in results, it could easily have to do with how far the system takes the sqrt series iteration. There are formulas to compute how far to iterate a series for some degree of accuracy, but I don't remember them (too long since my last Calculus course
). In any event, you should expect different CPUs to take the series to different iterations, especially since AFAIK, IEEE hasn't defined a floating-point accuracy standard regarding square root calculations.
Kelledin
bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?
RAM shouldn't make a difference; this thing should fit easily in <1MB, no matter how large your counter gets. Even if it's computing the series by which it gets the square-root result in software, it doesn't have to hold all elements of the series at one time.
Also, this test doesn't actually spawn off separate child processes. That's what clusters excel at--tasks that end up spawning off many independent threads of execution to do work in parallel (i.e. neural nets and the like). It's likely that the process in its entirety got executed on one node of your cluster.
As for the difference in results, it could easily have to do with how far the system takes the sqrt series iteration. There are formulas to compute how far to iterate a series for some degree of accuracy, but I don't remember them (too long since my last Calculus course
Kelledin
bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?