Re: [MLUG] Help with computing project

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Jonathan King wrote:
>
> On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>
> > Michael Procter wrote:
> > >
> > > Another question -- if I run the client on two boxes behind a firewall which
> > > would appear to have the same IP address, will your server be able to tell
> > > them apart or just get confused?
> > >
> >
> > That is no problem.  I am doing the same myself.
>
> Presumably okay to invoke it as "./darts-client &"?
>
> jking

OK, so two of my elephants are spinning cycles, throwing darts.  After I
finish preparing a lecture or two (cough), I can dry to get another six
or so Linux boxes with the program, and they'd be up by the weekend.

But to think a bit bigger for a minute...would this program work okay on
an NT (or similar) box under cygwin?  If so, you might be able to take
advantage of some serious spare cycles around campus.  Here in the psych
department, we have (I'm guessing) dozens of PCs that could be enslaved if
there was an automatic enough way to do the job.  Installing cygwin could,
I think, be justified on other grounds, and is pretty easy (although,
alas, it requires your physical presence).  Then I *think* you could fire
up cygwin at start-up, and in particular have its sshd port listening.
Then when somebody has a serious computational job that "clientizes" well,
they could push the new code at the slaves and start them up via ssh.

But, hey, why stop there?  At at university like MU that lacks some of
your more serious computational facilities but has scads and scads of now
pretty powerful (and shockingly idle) PCS, you could take this campus-wide
through departments and it could be a pretty interesting project.  Anybody
know of anything similar elsewhere?  I just did a back of an envelope
calculation, and I think somebody could propose this as a research board
project (to start) and then move up from there.

Of course, I'm not sure how much this will help your darts program in the
short term. :-)  Specifically, I just tried to make darts-client under
cygwin and got fatal errors that I can't debug at the moment. :-(

jking

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