A vision for Parrot

[Frodo Morris]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> In article <aq8cut$4pr$1 at news.ox.ac.uk>, Frodo Morris  <""> wrote:
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>>Beowulfs (although why you'd be using byte-compiled languages in 
>>parallel computing is beyond me), because you could use inetd or similar 
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> To catch up with the Javans.
Actually, I just thought of a reason!  No, me miss!  Me!!!
<cough>

How cool would it be to just set up a computer with a listening parrotd 
and DHCP client, plug it in to the Beowulf and have it automagically 
recognised as a node and delegated tasks?
I have been thinking quite a bit about cross-platform Beowulfing 
recently.  My initial idea was to set up an rlogin or something on the 
node machines, and have the Apple (that's what I call the conducting 
machine: "Apple" because it sends Jobs away, does nothing for a while 
then gets Jobs back :-) distribute the source code for the node service 
and job processor, configure and build the code, then log out and use 
the new node as normal.  This would be faster (provided the building 
didn't fall over) as Beowulfs go, but less secure and probably harder to 
set up.
Comments [rational variety preferred]?
-- 
FM