This term I'm taking a course in high-performance computing
<http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall10/G22.2945-001/index.html>, and I have
to pick a topic for a final project. According to the assignment
<http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall10/G22.2945-001/final-project.pdf>,
"The only real requirement is that it be something in parallel." In
the class, we covered
* Microoptimization of single-threaded code (efficient use of CPU cache, etc.)
* Multithreaded programming using OpenMP
* GPU programming using OpenCL
and will probably briefly cover distributed computing over multiple
machines with MPI. I will have access to a high-performance cluster
at NYU, including lots of CPU nodes and some high-end GPUs. Unlike
most of the other people in the class, I don't have any interesting
science projects I'm working on, so something useful to
MediaWiki/Wikimedia/Wikipedia is my first thought. If anyone has any
suggestions, please share. (If you have non-Wikimedia-related ones,
I'd also be interested in hearing about them offlist.) They shouldn't
be too ambitious, since I have to finish them in about a month, while
doing work for three other courses and a bunch of other stuff.
My first thought was to write a GPU program to crack MediaWiki
password hashes as quickly as possible, then use what we've studied in
class about GPU architecture to design a hash function that would be
as slow as possible to crack on a GPU relative to its PHP execution
speed, as Tim suggested a while back. However, maybe there's
something more interesting I could do.