ClusterFights!

The CY8C4013 Connection Machine - Schematc Capture and Layout

ClusterFights! — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 18:45:37 GMT

On a whim, I bought a bunch of really cheap microcontrollers and I'm connecting them together to create a parallel computer similar to the Connection Machine. This was a Twitch livestream where I finished schematic capture and laid out the PCB.

TI99/4A Telnet into FPGA/RaspPi Cluster

ClusterFights! — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 10:42:20 GMT

For the 2019/03 RetroChallenge, ClusterFights member Brandon Blodget's goal was to create a way for the TI99/4A computer to control his FPGA/RaspPi compute cluster... bringing together fun old technology with fun new technology. This was the result shown at the 3/30/2019 ClusterFight Night.

Round 1 (GutenHash), ClusterFight Night 3/31/2019

ClusterFights! — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 10:39:22 GMT

This particular challenge was to find a 19 character string that has the MD5 hash of 0xedf09aa5db5f3986a9fdca080e9d9871 out of a 430MB dataset. Oh, and the compute clusters have to weigh in at less than $250!

ClusterFights Cluster Clinic - SD Card Interfaces and Protocols

ClusterFights! — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 04:09:53 GMT

ClusterFights member Jeff Comstock presents his research on interfacing with SD cards on a low level - either through SPI or something called SD mode. He also delves into FAT filesystems and some of the quirks and 'gotchas' of SD cards. This is the first time we've recorded a Cluster Clinic talk and as such we're still trying to figure out the best way to do it. If anyone has thoughts on how to make the video less choppy or improve the quality in other ways, let us know in the comments!

ClusterFights Cluster Clinic - Vectorizing C Code

ClusterFights! — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 03:46:05 GMT

ClusterFights member Bob Smith presents his research on vectorizing C code in order to speed up computation and perform certain tasks (like computing MD5 sums) in parallel. This is the first time we've recorded a Cluster Clinic talk and as such we're still trying to figure out the best way to do it. If anyone has thoughts on how to make the video less choppy or improve the quality in other ways, let us know in the comments!