Beowulf + E ?

[Mark S. Miller]

At 02:49 PM 5/6/99 , Chip Morningstar wrote:
>Bill Frantz and I were chatting over lunch yesterday and it occurred to me to
>wonder if you have investigated/looked into/heard of the community of folks
>doing parallel computation with what they call Beowulf clustering (see, for
>example, www.beowulf.org).

Nothing deep.  Just a few casual conversations.


>...
>Second, I'm thinking about the model presented in _Crossing The Chasm_. 
Perhaps
>we should think about more consciously positioning E as the Perl or Visual
>Basic of distributed systems: its job is not to run fast, its job is to enable
>unsophisticated programmers of average competence to quickly and fairly easily
>whip together boring but valuable small-to-medium sized (distributed)
>applications. Being the hardcore hacker early adopter types that we are, we
>*like* to think of what we are doing here as edge-of-the-art stuff, but it may
>be more advantageous to posture as the second wave of technology, making this
>class of systems accessible to the mainstream.

I quite agree with this last paragraph.  The difference between Joule & E is 
primarily E's effort to be immediately understandable and familiar to a 
large number of Perl, Python, & VB level programmers; and to enable them to 
casually create working distributed applications, without needing a deep 
knowledge of distributed system foo.

However, the Internet as a whole is a much bigger laboratory than Beowulf 
clusters, and there's a lot more payoff for a lot more people if they can 
target their distributed app development at the Open Internet.  With E, this 
shouldn't be harder than targeting a closed Beowulf cluster.

A good example is MarcS' upcoming Secureit-EChat -- a truly secure 2-person 
distributed chat program in 5 pages of E code, about 3 of which are user 
interface.  Watch http://www.skyhunter.com/marc.html 

Of course, if a Beowulf-based opportunity to advance the project presented 
itself, great!

	Cheers,
	--MarkM