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Thursday, November 14, 2002 |
Everybody, come together
I'm at a "Grid Computing" talk by Miron Livny, of our CS department. Condor is UW's project to link up and use the "leftover" (not "free") cycles on clusters of computers around campus. Lots of non-obvious issues, like how to keep an expensive license busy; the licenses can be a bigger expense these days than the hardware they run on, and it's difficult to move them around to keep them busy. Knowing who can do what in your distributed resource is another; lots of academic projects these days have Principal Investigators (PIs) at more than one institution. Where do you keep track of who can and can't use a piece of data or software?Two good responses from the question and answer sessions.
- "That's a good question, and you know that when someone says that's a good question they don't have an answer for you."
- On a security issue: "I would be the last one to tell you that we have solved everything, because if I did, all my research funding would be terminated immediately."
