Project ideas

Thanks to Alan Edelman, Ken Takusagawa, and Viral Shah for contributions 


Parallel Jacobi computation/simulation 

Running MATLAB*P across multiple clusters via IMPI 

'Automatically' parallelize for-loops with mm mode? 

Use video cards to do interesting parallel computation 

Parallel filters 

Write new frontend for *p- Octave? R? maxima? Write interpreter? 

Try matlab optimization stuff in *P 

Computer graphics: ray tracing 

Computer graphics: simulate cloth and movement of cloth 

Computer graphics: any sort of animation 

Simulate a musical instrument (wind, string, percussion, other?) 

Simulate a stellar collision (Scientific American, Nov 2002) 

Parallel linear programming (perhaps take advantage of star*p) 

HTML renderer 

Integer factorization by quadratic or numberfield sieve 

Replicate a known result: 2^20,996,011-1 is prime. 4-color map theorem. 
4x4x4 3D tic-tac-toc-toe is first-player(?) win. kepler conjecture 

Create a game playing program for some game other than Chess. 
Or chess, if you really want. 

Generate some fractal images 

Simulate a nuclear weapon (see if men in black suits show up at your door) 

Program perterbation. Investigate the effects of typos for a 
particular programming language/compiler. Start with a working 
program and introduce perturbations (typos). What percentage 
cause a compile-time error? 

Computational biology--Motif discovery: given one set of strings 
labeled POSITIVE, and another labeled NEGATIVE, find the word 
(substring) that is present in each postives string not in any 
of the negatives, with the complication that there is noise: 
many strings are misclassified in the wrong set. 

Computational biology. A genome typically contains instances of long
chunks of DNA that are identical to another chunk somewhere else. 
Remove these duplicated chunks. Keep in mind that the human genome 
will NOT fit in RAM.