Is there an alternative to using time to seed a random number generation?

Question

I\'m trying to run several instances of a piece of code (2000 instances or so) concurrently in a computing cluster. The way it works is that I submit the jobs and the clust

Answer 1

Just an idea... generate a GUID (which is 16 bytes) and sum its 4-byte or 8-byte chunks (depending on the expected width of the seed), allowing integer wrap-around. Use the result as a seed.

GUIDs typically encapsulate characteristics of the computer that generated them (such as MAC address), which should make it rather improbable that two different machines will end-up generating the same random sequence.

This is obviously not portable, but finding appropriate APIs/libraries for your system should not be too hard (e.g. UuidCreate on Win32, uuid_generateon Linux).