On Sat, Mar 03, 2001 at 02:31:49AM -0800, Tyrel Beede wrote:
> I was thinking that the dreamcast has got to be a pretty good number
> crunching machine due to it's original line of work.  I'm wondering how
> this characteristic could be exploited in some sort of a number
> crunching facitily.  What would it be good for and does it have any
> advantage over a PC in this area?  Something perhaps suited for an
> application like finding prime numbers or crunching seti data?

I don't know about other problems, but I suspect these are not the
right problems for a Dreamcast largely due to the small amount of
local RAM and storage. The GIMPS notes mention that 100 megabytes can be
shuffled around every second, which would mean you either need to hack
a huge ramdisk into your Dreamcast or build an IDE adapter for it.

As SETI goes, the problem is similar-- I quit running SETI on machines at
home because 64MB of RAM simply wasn't enough to run SETI and something 
else. And the Dreamcast only has 16MB RAM.

The Dreamcast really needs a wholly number crunching problem, not one that
involves lots of data that needs crunching. 

-JDF
--
J.D. Forinash                           ,-.       
Georgia Tech College of Computing CNS  ( <  	  
211 CCB; (404)-385-0391                 `-'
The more you learn, the better your luck gets.