Assistance sought with mondo numerical app

[D. Michael McFarland]

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