[Bioclusters] Distributed Load Management on the desktop

[Andrew D. Fant]

Tim Cutts wrote:

> Here, we tend to treat desktop machines as fairly dumb terminals,  used
> for X sessions, WWW and e-mail (and office applications in the  case of
> Windows machines).  We used to have a few Tru64 workstations  (about 10)
> working as submission-only hosts.  They became very  awkward to
> maintain, and have steadily been replaced with the dumb  linux terminals
> everyone else has.  I think there's only one left  now, and I pretend it
> doesn't exist.  :-)
> 
> If you encourage users to start doing real work on their local 
> processors with local data, it can easily become a management  nightmare
> for your desktop support folks, to say nothing of coming up  with a
> backup strategy for the machines' local data.  Better to keep  the
> desktop machine dumb, so if it fails you just bin it (or at least  take
> it away to fix at leisure) and give them another one.

This does beg a question.  Do your users do all their GUI-work and Visualization
over the network and run those software packages on the head node?  I'd love to
have the cluster with isolated storage and such, but I've been trumped by
administrative policy.

Thanks,
	Andy

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