A flashy way to start the new year: 1024 MyriaNodes performing a light show. On monday the 11th of January, Chess organized the "1000-nodes experiment", where for the first time an attempt was made to let around 1K MyriaNodes organize into a network. The experiment took place in "de Lichtfabriek", a pop-concert hall in Haarlem. The nodes were aligned in an 8x8x16 block, with around one meter distance between nodes. Nearly all nodes managed to get synchronized, and a global clock algorithm was run to give every node the same round number. Unfortunately, getting them to actually perform light patterns went awry, as the commands for two different patterns were present in the network, and vied for control. The result was, however, quite colorful and psychedelic.



Though the results of this experiment weren't as astounding as was hoped for, one should realize that this kind of experiment usually is held with the aim of getting insight and obtaining data, rather than to actually show something works. As 15GB(!) of data were collected, who knows what interesting and unexpected behavior may be discovered. It was already quite reassuring that 1024 nodes, packed practically into a one-hop distance space, were able to synchronize, maintaining the strict energy-efficient communication schemes they did. Hopefully this experiment will reveal practical limitations to the current architecture, and allow us to come up with ways around them.
On a sidenote, our Android-MyriaNode-sniffer combination had its first use, and it seemed to be capable to deal with the many messages flying around, gathering 2.5K of them in some fifteen minutes.