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Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs
Supercomputers are the ultimate kit for more than day-dreaming power-programmers. Superpower governments and giant multinationals rely heavily on them. Their astronomical costs have meant that few programmers have had the pleasure of even writing a single machine instruction for these ivory-tower instruments of knowledge.
But what does all this have to do with Java?
But how do you get millions of Internet nodes to execute some code?
Enter the ubiquitous Web browser (which by now is likely to be Java-compatible). Most applets embedded in a Web page these days range in usefulness from the entertaining but excrutiatingly slow to the annoying crash-on-arrival type. Why not distribute some useful applets for a change, like ones tackling a massive computational problem whose solution could benefit the world, instead of the military or some profit-obsessed oil giant?
Although raytracing is not what this article is about, I shall give you a very brief summary of the technique: Computer generated images all have at their heart a mathematical description of the scene to be generated. Life-like images are produced from three-dimensional mathematical descriptions, where the scene or model is composed out of simple building blocks like flat polygons, spheres, cubes, cones, and lines. To obtain realistic images, the algorithm must model color and light and all its physical side-effects (shadows, reflections, transparancy, brightness, and darkness) as close to the real phenomenon as possible. This is where the cheaper image-rendering algorithms use shortcuts that trade image quality for speed of generation. Raytracing does the opposite. Its goal is maximum realism at the expense of quick rendering.