Proposal: Fedora at Home Project

[Matthew Farrellee]

Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 18:26 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>>
>>> I see this being more interesting as a way to have Fedora as a
>>> community interact with outside computing efforts. Off the top of my
>>> head, let's say we had this infrastructure up and running. Could we
>>> reach out to the blender community and work with them by offering the
>>> Fedora grid to help render scenes of another community funded animated
>>> film?
>>>
>>> -jef"I hope Greg is reading this"spaleta
>> Greg is reading this.
>>
>> But Greg doesn't understand enough to be useful.  So maybe someone can 
>> draw me a picture, or point me to a previously drawn picture that I may 
>> have studiously ignored.  The picture should answer these questions:
>>
>> 1. What does a developer need to do to make an application "grid aware"?
> 
> Sometimes nothing; pieces built around the application include the
> parameters needed for a particular work unit of the application.
> Sometimes lots.  Hopefully this is one of the former cases.  

Nothing, if you want to run just about anything. More than nothing and 
less than lots, if you want to run something that can use functionality 
such as managing checkpoints.


>> 2. What does a user need to do to farm out activity to the grid?
> 
> Again, depends highly on the implementation, but often it consists of
> nothing more than delivering executables to an interface and then
> telling that interface how to parameterize the runs.

The user needs to write a description of their job, which includes the 
application to run, parameters, and input files.


>> 3. What application could be a test case for this grid functionality?
> 
> Blender or povray are great test cases since you can chunk up a scene as
> desired and have separate processors work independently on their chunks.

Sounds like Jef had a line on this.


Best,


matt