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Re: Tesla Research Institute, anyone? (fwd)



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 14:48:36 +1000 (EST)
From: Rodney Graham Davies <rgd872-at-anu.edu.au>
To: Tesla List <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Subject: Re: Tesla Research Institute, anyone? (fwd)

Hi All,

On Thu, 30 Apr 1998, Tesla List wrote:

> Anyone ever thought about starting an organization for researching Tesla
> coils?  I remember their where rumblings a little while back about
> starting a Tesla coil documentation project(which I was involved in),
> but it kind of fizzled.  I know of the ITS, but they aren't really aimed
> at researching Tesla coils, they're more of a historical society from what
> I can tell.  I think the major benefit of having an organized effort to
> research tesla coils, would be the ability to collectively setup a PC
> cluster, basically creating a low-budget supercomputer that members of the
> TRI could submit jobs to over the net and receive the results back once
> computation was done.  I readily admit I know little about the workings of
> a tesla coil, but I _DO_ know what's involved to setup a cluster for
> supercomputing applications.  Any thoughts?  TIA,  TTYL!

We have (for the past 8 months) been collecting data and doing a fair bit
of tesla coil modeling/number crunching on a small multi-processor setup
(4 Sun 10's) at the Australian National University's computer science
dept., but because of the expense, we've now put funding forward to setup
10 Pentiums (200's) in parallel running the SMP (Sequencial Multi
Processing) version of Linux - should easily get a few hundred MFLOPS of
peak processing power...  This has been in the pipeline for 3 months...

The modelling work we have worked on in the past involved both discrete 
and continuous model development (most of the work being spent doing the 
continuous modelling). These models have been developed to simulate tesla 
coil operation (in ideal resonant-charging modes) to observe the 
behaviour of the electric and magnetic field gradients, whilst being able 
to adjust the tuning parameters of the system in real-time - something 
that's pretty hard to do in real-life! :-)

We haven't as yet developed a model which takes discharges into 
consideration during operation - which of course will make the results 
change quite significantly due to C and Q fluctuations...as I 
said, we've only managed to get as far as *ideal* conditions.

We're awaiting for the new parallel system to be installed and will be 
porting the work over to that... current time frame is about 1-2 months.
We hope to have the machine available for use on the net sometime towards 
the end of the year... The system is aimed to be a general-use machine, 
and since the above topic popped up, I thought I'd inform you all of some 
future processing prospects aswell as current work...

Well, that's just a brief description of what we're doing, so if anyone 
would like to know more, please let me know...

Cheers,

Rod

Tesla Technology Australia Pty Ltd
http://www.tesla-technology-dot-com..au