* Reaching the goal with NetBSD and the Regensburg Marathon Cluster

Last weekend, R-KOM and the University of Applied Science
(Fachhochschule, FH) Regensburg, Germany, took their share of the
Regensburg city marathon by putting a video and image of each runner
reaching the goal on the Internet. A cluster of 45 machines from the
Fachhochschule Regensburg, each running the NetBSD operating system
computed over fivethousand films.

The cluster machines were operating on a common NFS storage,
performing two steps. First, the video stream provided in MPEG format
was split into single pictures, then a six seconds long movie was
assembled for each runner reaching the goal, showing his personal run
through the goal. Overall computing time was about 20h in which the
five hours of video material was split into 670.000 images, that were
then re-assembled into 5500 MPEG streams of about 1 megabyte each.

An a short english-language description of the Marathon Cluster is
available at:

          http://www.feyrer.de/marathon-cluster/intro-en.html

The german version which has many details on the setup and operation
of the cluster is available at:

          http://www.feyrer.de/marathon-cluster/intro.html


 - Hubert Feyrer

-- 
Hubert Feyrer <hubert@feyrer.de>