Transient "Beowulf" cluster of Erlang nodes.

[Thomas Arts]

That sounds like a very good application of the
leader election behaviour that Ulf Wiger and I wrote two
weeks ago.

The leader election behaviour let you select a set of 
nodes from which one leader has to be selected. 
These nodes are your PC's. 
If more than 50% of the PC's is started, a leader is 
chosen (well, it has some way to choose among a 
smaller subset, but that is rather dubious).

The leader will be known by all involved processes
and can be taken as the central node, since the
leader knows all participating processes (even those
that come in later).

Ask Ulf whether you can have the source code. It is
produced insite Ericsson, thus I cannot disctribute the code.

You would be a beta tester of the code :0).

/Thomas

---
ACM Sigplan Erlang Workshop
Call for papers: http://www.erlang.se/workshop/2003/


Dr Thomas Arts 
     Program Manager 
     Software Engineering and Management 
IT-university in Gothenburg 
Box 8718, 402 75 Gothenburg, Sweden 
http://www.ituniv.se/

Tel +46 31 772 6031 
Fax +46 31 772 4899 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter-Henry Mander" <erlang@REDACTED>
To: <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 12:27 PM
Subject: Transient "Beowulf" cluster of Erlang nodes.


> Hi y'all,
> 
> I have a small project in mind, and would like to know whether someone 
> has done it before, and if so, how?
> 
> I intend to harness the redundant processing power of our office PCs as 
> a pool of Erlang nodes while everyone is out (overnight or over the 
> weekend, hence "transient Beowulf cluster") and carry out some stress 
> tests on our product using the office PC cluster to share the processing 
> load. The scheme is to create a Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net) style 
> boot CD-ROM containing R9B that is inserted into the appropriated PCs, 
> which are rebooted or turned on and left to boot up without any further 
> intervention.
> 
> The main question is how to get the central controlling node, or all the 
> nodes to automagically discover which PCs have been assimilated into the 
> Erlang cluster without any user intervention, and produce a list of 
> available nodes?
> 
> Are there any other aspects I have to be aware of?
> 
> Pete.
> 
> 
> 
>