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DCF

What is it?

DCF is a simple proof of concept code for a distributed computing framework a la Set@Home, Genome@Home etc. It implements the bare bones of the distributed parts in Perl and XML-RPC. As I am more interested in the distributed part of distributed computing I have no great project to give you, but if you have one then this could be what you are looking for.

What it doesn't do

Much of the slickness of the more 'professional' distributed computing projects is absent here.

• Doesn't go into background
• It is not crash resistant, although fred.pl could implement this
• Does not farm out the same unit to several clients for crosschecks
• The server keeps all it's data in memory which will eat resources
• You could probably crash it quite easily
• It probably doesn't scale too well
• No work unit caching on the client

What is it good for

If you have your own project then this will handle the distributed part without you having to worry about it.

It is written in Perl and uses XML-RPC to communicate. This means it will run on almost anything and can talk over the Internet to any other system.

XML-RPC is available for almost all languages and platforms so the client and server can easily be rewritten if needs be.

What next

• A database could handle more but might have to become more OS specific.
• Fred.pl could be coded to show how to survive a crash.
• The client could cache work units.

The software

This little zip archive contains the Perl source for DCF. Extract the archive to where ever you want it and run it.

The DCF project files

The future

The truth is as a proof of concept is it almost complete and will probably be updated to a version 1.5 and then stop unless anyone has a particular need for it. Without a project there is only so far it can go. But it has been fun and I have picked up XML-RPC so it wasn't so bad.

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