Introduction to Fedora Nightlife
by Bryan Che
Fedora Nightlife is a new project for creating a Fedora community grid.
People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers
to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially
beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large
amounts of computing power. Given the large number of Fedora users, I
hope that we will eventually be able to build a community grid of over a
million nodes at Fedora. This will be a great example of the power of
the Fedora community, give people new and meaningful ways to contribute
to Fedora, advance the development of large-scale grid software, and
lead to real benefits for the world.
Fedora Nightlife will leverage the Condor project, which was
(http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/) created and hosted by the University of
Wisconsin Madison, for scheduling and harnessing donated computing
power. Last year, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin signed a
strategic partnership around Condor. Part of this partnership entailed
releasing Condor's source code under an OSI-approved open source
license. As a result, we now have Condor packaged at Fedora, and
upstream development continues to happen at the University of Wisconsin
repository in an open manner.
Some of the immediate next steps for Fedora Nightlife are:
-create a Wiki page for this project
-get a Condor scheduler hosted at Fedora up and running
-work out what are the requirements for a project to be able to run on
Fedora Nightlife (e.g. its software must be open source, it must be
safe, it should have some kind of open policy around its results, etc)
We've already started working on getting a scheduler up and running. I
should have a wiki setup relatively soon so that we can start mapping
out more plans there.
Then, we can focus on growing the Nightlife community of projects and
solicit Fedora users to donate capacity. Hopefully, enabling donation
of compute power to Nightlife can eventually become a first-boot option
for Fedora installs.
I welcome everyone to contribute to and participate in the Fedora
Nightlife project!
Bryan
16 years
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