I'm involved with a part of the Human Genome Project, and we run (around) 100 linux boxen under Condor for our often quite large computations.
This is not what everyone wants from a cluster; the focus is on large amounts of computation over time, not particularly fast computation over a few minutes. And it can take some work to break a task into jobs it will distribute effectively. Perhaps I should be clearer: it's intended to distribute jobs not cycles. And it can be hard to control how local file access and networked file access interact, if you need to. And it does some tricks with user priority which don't fit with some models of shared access.
Nevertheless, it works, and it's a wonderful thing to see a giant numbercrunch you've been running as one process split up and run in parallel, my goodness. And Condor has allowed us to do that without getting involved in any tricky parallel programming or even changing code: jobs run on their own box, happily unaware that they're part of a cluster at all, essentially.
So while I've had my issues with it, it has certainly been useful to us and is worth checking out. It's easy to find faults with anything; this has allowed us to get our work done, which is the main thing. I should also mention that Condor is continually improving, and the new version we've just installed seems to resolve at least some of our problems.
I think the important, or at least REALLY COOL, thing is that these questions are being taken seriously. Whether some bacteria came from a geothermal vent or are ancestors of the aliens that ganked Mars Lander, there's an expansion of our definitions for and expectations of how and where "Life" can exist that can only be exciting for a child of the science fiction mythos such as myself.
I have friends who study astrobiology in school, in a rigorous academic way. The name has been changed from "exobiology" exactly because many terrestrial beasties and environments are so relevant to discussion of where and how else life might exist. So I don't see some ambiguity about the source of these baceria as at all reducing their importance.
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I'm involved with a part of the Human Genome Project, and we run (around) 100 linux boxen under Condor for our often quite large computations.
This is not what everyone wants from a cluster; the focus is on large amounts of computation over time, not particularly fast computation over a few minutes. And it can take some work to break a task into jobs it will distribute effectively. Perhaps I should be clearer: it's intended to distribute jobs not cycles. And it can be hard to control how local file access and networked file access interact, if you need to. And it does some tricks with user priority which don't fit with some models of shared access.
Nevertheless, it works, and it's a wonderful thing to see a giant numbercrunch you've been running as one process split up and run in parallel, my goodness. And Condor has allowed us to do that without getting involved in any tricky parallel programming or even changing code: jobs run on their own box, happily unaware that they're part of a cluster at all, essentially.
So while I've had my issues with it, it has certainly been useful to us and is worth checking out. It's easy to find faults with anything; this has allowed us to get our work done, which is the main thing. I should also mention that Condor is continually improving, and the new version we've just installed seems to resolve at least some of our problems.
I'm interested to see what else is out there...
I think the important, or at least REALLY COOL, thing is that these questions are being taken seriously. Whether some bacteria came from a geothermal vent or are ancestors of the aliens that ganked Mars Lander, there's an expansion of our definitions for and expectations of how and where "Life" can exist that can only be exciting for a child of the science fiction mythos such as myself.
I have friends who study astrobiology in school, in a rigorous academic way. The name has been changed from "exobiology" exactly because many terrestrial beasties and environments are so relevant to discussion of where and how else life might exist. So I don't see some ambiguity about the source of these baceria as at all reducing their importance.