Assistance sought with mondo numerical app

[Don Garrett]

  I have a couple of Pentium 450s that can help. RedHat 7.x with Python 2.2
but no additional modules yet. I can install them, but probably take me a day
or two to get to it. So... 4-6 problems, I guess?

"D. Michael McFarland" wrote:
> 
> Dear Fellow Pythonistas,
> 
>     A friend of mine is in the throes of finishing his
> Ph.D. dissertation, comparing experimental and numerical results for
> material damage caused by grinding.  For the numerical part, he's
> using a finite element library I wrote in Python.  This library made
> programming the tensor operations much easier than they might have
> been in, say, Fortran, but the end result takes rather longer to run
> than one could hope--about a day per problem case on a PII-450.  He
> has two machines of this class available, and I have two, and that
> might just be enough to let him make his deadline, but it occurred to
> me where to find more machines: this newsgroup.
> 
>     In short, we want your flops.
> 
>     I'm writing in the hope that a few people with CPU time to spare
> over the next couple of weeks will agree to run a case or two each.
> Volunteers would need to be running a fairly recent Python and the
> Numerical module, and install Neil Schemenauer's sparsemodule from
> 
> http://python.ca/nas/python/sparsemodule/
> 
> The output files are large, so some bandwidth is needed.  Unix or
> something like it is the only OS we're prepared to run on, unless
> someone wants to try to make our code run under MS Windows (I wouldn't
> know where to begin, myself, but it might not be too difficult).
> 
>     I'm open to suggestions, but the simplest strategy seems to be to
> mail source code, problem input files and a Makefile to control the
> whole mess to each participant, with results to be FTPed back.
> 
>     Incidentally, we have always meant to release this code once it
> was polished, and we still plan to do so.  But first this guy needs to
> graduate, for which he needs to crunch a _lot_ of numbers.  He's
> swamped with related work, and I feel like I got him into this, so I'm
> appealing to the Python community on his behalf.  Any offers of
> assistance or other advice will be gratefully received.
> 
>                               Best regards,
>                               Michael
> 
> --
>     D. Michael McFarland                      dmmcf at uiuc.edu
>     Visiting Senior Research Scientist & Visiting Lecturer
>     Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering
>     University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

--
Don Garrett                             http://www.bgb.cc/garrett/
BGB Consulting                                      garrett at bgb.cc