cbohannan's blog

I've been mucking around in the world of distributed programming recently. In my defense, I was investigating this topic BEFORE Scott got his hands on a stack of rack mount computers from Intel. But I will admit the sight of all those idle CPU's put the angst into my code-writing fingers. So I've gone ahead and actually written a distributed application.

A little background on distributed computing. First off, we need the obligatory "Linux is awesome." There is a kernel module for Linux called MOSIX that will transparently move CPU/Memory bound applications away from the machine they were launched on, and return those processes as soon as they need to make a system call. That's awesome.

I am doing some research for Dr. Tang, a professor in the MSU Computer Science Department. He wants to find an optimal set of channels for a wireless mesh network for some networking metric. Some common metrics are Quality of Service (QoS), throughput, and latency. Of course any algorithms he wants to try out require testing in the simulation environment we use, called OpNet. OpNet is an unweildly beast, and I spend most of my time wrestling with it. The hard part is that for his research, Tang wants each node to have multiple radios. The simulator really doesn't like that.

This is my first blog post ever! I came to this weeks LUG during a very busy week because I didn't want to miss David Boreham presenting. I have a lot of respect for him ever since I interviewed with him to work at his company, Bozeman Pass Inc. I didn't get the job, but I did get to spend four hours learning things from him. I think he is a very wise man. I also needed to give him his book back. I've been holding on to On Intelligence for some time.