The goal of this assignment is to practice concurrent and distributed programming using the SALSA programming language.

You are to analyze three-dimensional data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, in particular, stars in our MilkyWay galaxy, for future human space colonization. Your program needs to compute the following:

• Closest neighbours Compute the set of pairs of stars that minimize pairwise distance.
• Farthest neighbours Compute the set of pairs of stars that maximize pairwise distance.
• Ideal hub stars Compute the set of stars which minimize the maximal distance to any other star.
• Ideal jail stars Compute the set of stars which maximize the minimal distance to any other star.
• Ideal capital stars Compute the set of stars which minimize the average distance to all other stars.

More information on Milky Way visualization can be found in the associated MilkyWay@Home forum.

You are given a stars text file with the first line giving the total number of stars in the file followed by one line per star representing each star's three dimensions <x,y,z> as X Y Z. Please remove duplicate entries in your program. Your output should look as follows:

d1  // minimal pairwise distance
s11 s12
s13 s14
...

d2  // maximal pairwise distance
s21 s22
s23 s24
...

d3 // minimum maximal distance
s31 s32
s33 s34
...

d4 // maximum minimal distance
s41 s42
s43 s44
... 

d5 // minimal average distance
s51
s52
...

Part 1 - Concurrent Solution

Using SALSA, write an actor-based solution to the space colonization problem.

Part 2 - Distributed Solution

Extra Credit - Mobile Actors Solution

Write an extension of your distributed space colonization solution so that actors can move to find better computational resources.

Other Possible Extensions

• Provide an analysis of sequential vs parallel execution performance.
• Provide an analysis of scalability.
• Develop a fault-tolerant distributed solution.

Due Date: April 29, 2011.
 

Received Time	Grade Modification
before Thursday, April 28, 11:59PM	+10%
before Friday, April 29, 11:59PM	no modification (on time)
before Saturday, April 30, 11:59PM	-10%
before Monday, May 2, 11:59PM	-25%
after Tuesday, May 3, 12:00AM	not accepted

Grading: The assignment will be graded mostly on correctness, but code clarity / readability will also be a factor (comment, comment, comment!).  See the professor or TAs, if you have ideas for other extensions for this assignment and would like extra credit for implementing them.

Submission Requirements: Please submit a ZIP file with your code, including a README file. In the README file, place the names of each group member (up to two). Your README file should also have a list of specific features / bugs in your solution. Your ZIP file should be named with your RPILMS user name(s) as the filename, either userid1.zip or userid1_userid2.zip. Only submit one assignment per pair via RPILMS.