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Introduction

In the field of scientific computing and natural sciences such as physics, biology and different fields in mathematics have problems that deal with either massive amount of information and/or computation. How are these scientists or mathematicians going about solving these problems? Supercomputers have been used to give a lot of power of single 'machine' to solve a particular problems such as weather prediction and climate research. But they tend to be expensive.

The field of distributed computing or parallel computing has enabled the use of less-powerful but yet inexpensive cluster of computers that are connected via some network. Problems such as trying to decrypt possible messages from aliens (a.k.a. SETI@home project) , or trying to find large primes are being worked on by myriad of computers worldwide. Also, a conventional problems that previously required the use of mainframes now are solved or worked on by many clusters.

From many standpoints from heat transfer in physics to solving a graph theory problem in mathematics, this project will examine background information needed to solve the problems themselves, but at the same time, solve them in parallel.


next up previous contents
Next: Background Up: CSC 492: Solving Problems Previous: Contents   Contents
J S 2002-08-14