Proposal: Fedora at Home Project

Bryan Che bche at redhat.com
Wed Mar 5 14:48:34 UTC 2008


Hi, my name is Bryan Che, and I am a long-time Fedora user and also the
Red Hat product manager for a new Red Hat product, Red Hat Enterprise
MRG (http://redhat.com/mrg).  I would like to propose to create a new
"Fedora at Home" project at Fedora which would use the open source
technologies in MRG (and which have already been submitted to Fedora).

MRG includes a grid scheduler based on the Condor project created by the
University of Wisconsin (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/).  This
scheduler includes the ability to harness idle CPU capacity from
desktops and also schedule to virtual machines.  I'd like to create a
Fedora at Home project where Fedora hosts a MRG grid scheduler, people can
donate CPU time on their computers for computations, and we schedule
meaningful or useful work to these people's computers.  This would be
like an open and general-purpose Folding at Home or SETI at Home project.

Ideally, we could include the client software for computation as part of
Fedora distributions and build out a large, million+ node open grid for
things like Fedora infrastructure tasks, scientific computing, or
socially-beneficial work.

This would be fantastic for Fedora as it would allow us to lead the open
source movement into the area of open services and community computing
based on open source.  It would also be a great marketing showcase for
Fedora by showing our leadership in grid technology and in the power of
our community.  And, it would provide Fedora users a feel-good way to
contribute to Fedora--even if they don't code--by contributing CPU
cycles towards things like builds or automated testing.  Finally, for
full disclosure: as the product manager for MRG, I would also love to be
able to point to a Fedora at Home project as a showcase of the technologies
in MRG at work in a massive, public grid.

Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin recently signed a partnership
that makes available the Condor source code under an OSI-approved open
source license (mostly ASL).  We have packaged Condor, submitted it to
the F9 development branch, and are maintaining it there.  The University
of Wisconsin's Condor project remains our upstream code base and
community.  So, from a technology perspective, we should be able to
build Fedora at Home using technologies that will all be in Fedora.

What are your thoughts on this?

(Please post replies to fedora-advisory-board at redhat.com as that is
where I will be following discussion)

Thanks,

Bryan






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