Decomission

Earlier this week I got presidential power. The presidents is a 24 node cluster of machines in my affiliated university. This means the weapons clusters have lost most of its purpose. The weapons cluster being a group of four crufty dying machines. Howling deep into the night the noises they made disturbed most people. In this modern age of cute little Mac-minis, something like these roaring monsters is unacceptable. Personally, I enjoy their demonic gurgles.

Unfortunately, the weapons cluster was not made as a way to scare the people that live with me. It was made to experiment with clustered computing. In addition to this, I was looking into experiencing first hand the issues with distributed computing. So these machines were equipped with a large bulk of nice software to do distributed things. The goal being to do clustered computation. In time, I learned that clustering and distributed processing are distinct concepts.

The goal of clustering is to make a bunch of machines act as one. Distributed computing seeks more to take advantage of the parallelism and use its salient features. Things like error handling and multiprogramming. Considering clustering is now being done for me, I have no more need for that of the weapons cluster. Sun Grid Engine will do that now. Still, since I do not have administrative access to presidents the weapons cluster will now strictly be for distributed computing. This means many of the features intended to be added, ie Condor, will not be.

In the meanwhile, back to programming in Erlang.