[erlang-questions] bspawner: spawn distribution among distributed nodes

[Bhasker Kode]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to announce of an the project i've just opened up called bspawner.

This project was an attempt to load-balance the task of spawning tasks
across multiple nodes . The steps involved can be isolated into a
couple of distinct problems.
  1. deciding which node needs to spawn a task
  2. communicating across these nodes
  3. maintaining a record of nodes, added /removed nodes ,etc

This project in its essence, deals with the first part and the
implementation of the message passing begins with the "messenger.erl"
program located at
http://www.erlang.org/doc/getting_started/conc_prog.html and will be
ported to different message-passing, load-balancing and
node-information maintenance based on feedback,suggestions ,comments,
and further changes inspired by the growing involvement of the erlang
community & encouragement from #erlang in particular.

Example
------------
Assuming that there are three nodes: nodeA,nodeB,nodeC

%%an un-balanced version

1>messenger:message(node1,{factorial,5}).
2>messenger:message(node1,{saveToDisk,"a.dat"}).
3>messenger:message(node1,{makeHttpRequest,Url}).
%%all requests originate from current node,and get spawned at target node1

%%un-balanced version

1>bspawner:bmessage(node1,{factorial,5}).
2>bspawner:bmessage(node1,{saveToDisk,"a.txt"}).
3>bspawner:bmessage(node1,{makeHttpRequest,Url}).

%%OR you can directly give in {M,F,A} format

1>bspawner:bspawn({bspawner_request,{NumberCrunchingMod,factorial,[5]} }).
2>bspawner:bspawn({bspawner_request,{io,CustomSaveToDisk,["a.txt"]} }).
3>bspawner:bspawn({bspawner_request,{ProxyPortHandler,makeHttpRequest,[Url]} }).

%% bmessage
%% replicates messenger:message(node1,"hi") but internally calls bspawn

1>bspawner:bmessage(node1,"hi").
%which is syntactic sugar for
2>bspawner:bspawn({ bspawner_request, {bspawner,message,["hi"]} })


This was however before i got to know about the pool module which is
exactly what i wanted in the first place. cheers to that, but it was a
fun learning experience anyway - and i'm looking to add more clarity
in terms of which node makes a request Vs which nose do processing,
possibly add features like to make sets  of nodes to do X,another set
to do Y, and more TODO's that i'd like to add along the way.

Links
--------
http://bspawner.googlecode.com
http://bosky101.blogspot.com/2008/05/erlang-distribution-bspawner.html


Keep Clicking,
Bhasker V Kode
bosky101 on #erlang