Hacker News | Ask HN: Looking for an open-source project to parallelise

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	Ask HN: Looking for an open-source project to parallelise
	6 points by pufuwozu 42 days ago \| comments
	I've just started a Parallel Programming unit at University and our major project (worth 50%) is to take an application and manually parallelise it to scale across multiple cores. I'd like to do the assignment where the target: * Is interesting * Requires a fair amount of effort and skill * Has some sort of barrier to making it parallel * Is welcoming to me taking up the project Does anyone know a project that fulfils most of these? The project's language or libraries aren't an issue.

5 points by Jtsummers 42 days ago | link

You could look into accelerating some of the common filters/operations in programs like Audacity, GIMP or some other open source media editor.

4 points by karanbhangui 42 days ago | link

how about one of the common compression libraries like zip or gzip?

2 points by jsarch 42 days ago | link

Are you looking for a project no one has done yet? Or a project to simply learn from? As an HPC programmer I can tell you that there are lots of scientific applications that you could try. However, I'd suggest that you start with something manageable and known to be parallelizable so that you can feel great when you finish it.

I think @jtsummers and @karanbhangui have the right idea, so I'd suggest making the Apache2 mod_deflate module parallel.

1 point by VanL 41 days ago | link

Try Python. There is lots of interest in getting CPython to scale across multiple cores, but the use of refcounting to manage object lifetime and the Global Interpreter Lock makes it hard.

If you want, you could even try to prototype using PyPy (python in python).

3 points by ggbaker 41 days ago | link

Honestly, I think this one is way beyond an undergraduate project. You aren't the first one to think Python should be parallelized: many smart people have tried to do it and gotten nowhere. Some of the other libraries mentioned here will be a more reasonable size (unless "unit" means PhD :-).

1 point by pufuwozu 41 days ago | link

It's only an undergraduate subject. Python is way off limits.

Thanks for all of the suggestions guys! This has really helped a lot.