I am proud to have a son who is a freshman at Bard college and who is taking Operating Systems (Comp Sci 326). The professor teaches this class using Raspberry Pis, and it is really cool to see what kinds or projects they are doing. Everyone has to do a class project, and my son has decided to do a parallel merge sort using the Raspberry Pi bramble using some kind of either divide-and-conquer, or master-slave architecture. He hasn't decided yet how to arrange things.
I think it's more fun to watch him consider all of the pros and cons of different designs than try to sort it out myself. My original goal for the bramble was to create a parallel environment to perform computations for my neural networks course (Coursera, "Neural Networks for Machine Learning"). However, we did everything in octave in a single Linux image, and it was really fast. I coudln't figure out a better way to architect the computational environment. This was my first experience with a numerical methods package, and I was duly humbled as a nube (my expertise is in operating systems and middleware).
My next idea was to simply run the World Community Grid on each node to create an array of individual elements that were admittedly slow, but which might perform respectably in aggregate. Enter my son, and his idea for parallel merge sorting. I'm going to get the bramble back at the end of the semester, and we'll play with it then to see what is possible from a WCG standpoint. If I'm lucky, my son will have other ideas that will take us for another adventure in computing.
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