Welcome to cisTheta2007! CisTheta is the name of a Linux Cluster my students and I put together. CisTheta2007 is the Baldwin High Computer Science Research Class or Independent Study Cluster Team. We're learning how to build and program a cluster.

Here's our first renderings. These plots are graphs of the Mandelbrot Set. The first plot took less than 2 minutes on 25 nodes. Each node is a Pentium IV running at 2.4Ghz with 1GB of RAM and GigaBit Ethernet. If we were to run this plot on one such PC, it would have taken about 75 minutes. I ran it at home on a Pentium III 800 Mhz and it took about 220 minutes. I also ran it on an old Pentium II 400 Mhz and it took about 650 minutes!

Most of these files were originally stored as BMPs with a resolution of 8000x6000 with a 24bit color depth. Each one of the 48 megaPixels represents up to 100000 iterations of a program we wrote in C++ for a total of nearly 5 trillion operations in under 2 minutes! Now that's a superComputer! The original file sizes were 100MB or more. I used the GIMP to convert them to JPEGs of about 1 or 2MB. Enjoy!

Sincerely,
Baldwin High Computer Science Research Class,
Independent Study Cluster Team,
CisTheta2007

During the summer of 2008, the CisTheta cluster was replaced with the new ShadowFax cluster. Please see our new page: [link]