Today in the Modeling Your Universe Workshop the workshop students learned about parallel processing from Aaron. The class used two clusters, one made out of three laptops, and the other is Little Fe. First the students tried running GalaxSee, a program that displays stars from two points of view. The user can edit the properties of the stars such as size of the stars, speed, running time, and mass of the stars. After first just running GalaxSee, the students were given the opportunity to play with the settings. Then they were asked to compare how they ran the program today to how they ran it yesterday. They came up with several differences and detailed what they liked better or less about the way the program was run today. Then the class was instructed to try changing specific numbers and seeing how that changed the program as a whole. The students specifically enjoyed changing the mass of the stars. In order to understand the concept of processors better, one student was given a puzzle. The amount of people attempting to solve the problem gradually increased until it was six people surrounding one puzzle. The students realized that this was not efficient. Then they broke the puzzle up so that each group of people had a part of the puzzle. This represented each part of the job being separated to different processors. While trying to solve this puzzle they learned many new terms such as resource contention (too many processors with not enough resources) and deadlock (one processor not doing anything). They also learned about the importance of communication between processors. This puzzle project helped the students understand the processors and the way the work is divided up between them.
Next the students played with the model Parameter Space. This is a Monte Carlo simulation that tries to calculate pi. There is a circle inscribed in a square and it randomly plots dots inside the square. It then divides the number of dots in the square by the number of dots in the circle. This results in pi. Finally, the students ran the model called Game of Life. They learned that there was lots of action because in each generation certain rules had to be set. Then they play with a similar version that can be found at shodor.org/interactivate/activities/Lifelite. The students then experimented and changed the parameters on the model. The students were exposed to many models that emphasized how many processors resulted in a program running faster. First there was the real life model, then the models on the computer. Along with learning about processors, the students learned many new computing terms, and how to use terminal.