Recently, I was writing some simple statistical calculation software running tests on small data sets with a floating sample “window” through the data. Basically, this becomes a O(n^2) over Mann-Whitney U. It was fast enough for small data sets — that is until I was asked to scale the data size by about an order of magnitude.
What to do? We had plenty of hardware and I was developing on a quad-core Xeon (!!!) so why not throw more hardware at it. I was only using one core. So how do I get to the other three? Enter Rinda — a Ruby implementation of Linda.Rinda or “Hardware is Cheap So Let’s Use More of it!”
February 25th, 2008 — Ruby
