Projects For When You Have Too Much Computing Power? 14
Spackler asks: "Recently, I completed a consulting gig that I needed to pick up 5 fast machines for a data conversion. Now that the conversion is complete, I have all this hardware, and nothing to compute. I know I could toss them together as a Beowulf cluster, but the big question is, what types of things do I compute on them? I know distributed.net, or Seti@home, or GIMPS would like them just added in, but are there any cool off the shelf things that need a ton of power, and take a long time to process, that can be done on a normal cluster? Some odd (but easy to understand) math question? Something cooler than brute force encryption breaking?" We've already had a discussion on some of the more well known distributed projects already, what are more home grown projects that one can use a cluster for?
Donate the computers to a school (Score:1)
Re:Break codes (Score:1)
Hit the ESCAPE key.
Can't find it? You didn't actually escape from Explorer.exe? Ah, well, I tried.
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Shouldn't be nessisary (Score:1)
Mindstorms.. build a robot that types.
use camra..
Set up camra to look at screen..
The program enters a password and looks to see if the screen is still asking for a password
(block out everything but the dialog box and use motion detection software to detect a "change" from the last image.. only compare after entering a password.. give computer time to verify password)
When it thinks it has the right password it should chime "You got hax0red" or whatever..
This should be amazingly simple.. just run a simple "half/hack" that trys simple passwords first.. then run down a list of posable combonations.
If you can rember ANY details of your password (such as how many keystrokes) include that... you probably know aprox how long it is so you can avoid things like single keystroke passwords..
This may take a while but it will eventually strike gold....
The limiting factor is that the password must be entered manually directly into the keyboard.
Now.. this shouldn't be nessisary...
This seems like an ideal security dosn't it? I mean it takes DAYS to crack a password and well you'll catch the guy sooner or later right?
Well.. no... He just steals your computer and uses this next solution..
Boot with a rescue disk (or CDrom) this is true of Linux as well as Windows...
In fact with Windows you may use Linux to rescue your Windows system..
Find the password file..
here is the tricky part.. I don't know how Windows passwords are layed out...
erase that file or edit it...
With Unix you gotta edit it...
Go and edit
(of shadow dosn't exist edit passwd)
root:mememememe:11262:0:::::
Now memememe in this example is the password (encrypted) obveously it'll accually be garbage but for this example I didn't want to give up my root password even if it is encrypted and my box isn't remote accessable.. (It's just a personal system I turn it off when not in use)
So anyway.. by erasing this your password is nullifyed... You can now log into your system.
You'll have to do some exploring on Windows or other non-unix systems to see how THEY do it..
But the princaple remains...
You have command of the computer itself.. you can bypass control.. you can nullify the password.
Way back someone I knew had his computer in the care of someone...
When he got his computer back the guy who was keeping the computer had added a password...
I booted a floppy (dos) and edited autoexec.bat and removed the the password prompt..
(It seems the guy I knew owed a lot of money)
The disk could have been encrypted but in this case it wasn't... That would have made life a lot tuffer.. but given a known encryption algrithm it wouldn't be hard to crack the password with a flopy boot client..
That is how you hax0r the g1bs0n (when the gibson is in your posession)
Has anyone used Mosix? (Score:1)
Has anyone actually used Mosix [mosix.org]?
What's the difference between a beowolf cluster and a Mosix one?
To me Mosix looks better suited to those of us who have more workstations than they can use at once, as software doesn't have to be written specially to use it.
How about using the machines as that?
How about saving lives? (Score:1)
Re:Has anyone used Mosix? (Score:1)
yea... I've been following the development of MOSIX for the past year or so. Its a great piece of software. Here's the idea behind it: you have a cluster of computers, a process starts on one of the computers, the MOSIX software figures out that there is less load on another computer and "migrates" (meaning moves the process and its entire environment) the process to another computer in the cluster.
This is much more useful to the average joe than something like a beowulf cluster would be. The advantages of MOSIX over a beowulf cluster include: it will work with any existing program (well, almost... it doesn't tend to migrate processes that have huge I/O requirements) and you don't need to put any special code into your software (no need to code something around the PVM or MPI libraries, like you would be doing for beowulf).
I'd suggest giving it a try if you have some extra machines laying around.
Two words.... (Score:1)
Popular power! (Score:1)
Algorithm testing... (Score:1)
Donations (Score:2)
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GRASS (Score:2)
Get yourself a GPS and start mapping your favorite haunts, generate MPG animations of your travels.
Hey if you don't find a use for all 5 of those machines I might have room in my study for one
Break codes (Score:2)
povray rendering farm (Score:2)
simulate weather/climate systems (Score:4)
About the time I got my first K6-3D box, and was considering an early Athlon box, I looked into weather simulation programs as a fun thing to run in order to use up all the excess CPU cycles I now had. A number of different packages exist that will produce interesting results, though I don't know how easily they can be made to compile and run on Linux (the problem is finding a good Fortran compiler): NCAR/Pennstate mesoscale model MM5 [ucar.edu], NCAR Community Climate Model CCM3 [ucar.edu], and Colorado State RAMS model [colostate.edu].