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  Saturday, October 11, 2003


Pocket GPS is a .NET application for Windows Pocket PC 2002. Michael Wittenburg built it to demonstrate his serial communications class, described in Andy Wigley's book, Microsoft .NET Compact Framework (Core Reference) . Some of the code for Pocket GPS is based on Joshua Trupin's eMbedded VB GPS application, featured in MSDN Magazine.


11:45:45 PM    comment []

Below is an excerpt from an articled titled Spb Software House Assembles the First Pocket PC "Supercomputer" Ever.  Check out the picture of the cluster.  Impressive!

As a part of the continuing research at Spb Software House, we have assembled and tested a computing cluster based on Pocket PC devices. Twelve Pocket PC devices have been joined in a cluster to perform distributed calculations - the devices share the load of a complex calculation. The concept was to compare the performance of several Pocket PC devices linked into a cluster with the performance of a typical Pentium II-class desktop computer...

The idea is quite simple: there are eleven Pocket PCs that act as nodes of the cluster, and these devices actually perform all the calculations. There is one additional device that is controlling the others, giving them small pieces of information to process, and collecting the results of each node's calculations. Our cluster was solving the "3n + 1" problem - it is a well-known mathematic problem that has not been solved yet. It is simple enough and very suitable for parallel calculations. We tried neither to solve this problem nor to achieve any significant results - we just wanted to see how a cluster of Pocket PCs would do that.

The Pocket PCs communicate with each other via IrDA using built-in infrared ports. Of course, communication via infrared is quite slow, but the problem we were "solving" did not require much communication between the nodes and the controlling Pocket PC. We could use Bluetooth or TCP/IP communication instead, but every Pocket PC has an infrared port and we did not want to involve any additional hardware.

It turns out that even a small cluster consisting of twelve nodes is still slower than a mainstream Pentium II-class desktop PC. However, the performance of Pocket PC devices is quite enough to deal with simple problems and their most important benefit is mobility. This makes Pocket PC platform very promising if used in distributed systems dealing with such problems as positioning and measurement...

 


10:17:33 PM    comment []


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