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Comment by jxy | Hacker News Reader

For a typical HPC cluster, there is a shared filesystem with exactly the same file structures across the cluster over a high bandwidth network, which basically replaces "a clever use of fuse/sshfs and chroots" with something far better. OP's project is clearly useless in HPC setting.

On the other hand, OP's project is exactly an linux/posix version of the same as what Plan 9 was designed to do and has been doing.

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I miss openMosix[1]... Its been so long, but I remember running kernel compiles on two workstations a long time ago... Double the core count! It actually gave a significant speedup on 100mbps switched lan (I think it was just a crossed cable, no actual switch).

I couldn't remember setting up NFS or anything like that - apparently openMosix did some tricks too: http://www.firewall.cx/linux-knowledgebase-tutorials/openmos...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix

> project is clearly useless in HPC setting

Which is why I'm curious about the applications they had in mind. I know that my workflow isn't typical for most people, so hopefully others have better uses in mind.

For me, I just submit adhoc jobs to SLURM and call it a day. Not everyone has access to an HPC cluster or is comfortable setting such a system up for a small, home cluster.

Anything (like this project) that makes HPC-like processing more accessible, I'm interested in.

When I developed this I was very much thinking of using this to run one-off compute heavy tasks, e.g. compressing a video, running scientific computations or rendering something in Blender. You would just rent a VM for a few hours with the hardware you need, set it up in a few minutes, run your job there and delete it again.

OP’s project is actually a good idea at development stage, where data is not the main thing yet..

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