DIY Big Data

I have always been interested in large scale computing. This interest started back in graduate school when I was studying astrodynamics. Most of the problems you want to solve in astrodynamics requires numerical computation, as only the 2-body problem has a closed form solution. In order to solve anything more complex, you first have to make some simplifying assumptions (e.g., no other gravitational influences), and then you have a set of partial differential equations that will describe the motion of your system. The only way to use these equations to predict the position of the bodies was through numerical integration. In simple systems this sort of calculations was pretty straightforward, though you have to pay a lot of attention to round off error. However, when if you were trying to predict the progression of a debris field in space, which would require you to simultaneously project the motion of tens of thousands of objects, parallelized computation start to look attractive. Compute Read More …