* Zach Kost-Smith [2011-10-19 16:20] writes:
I wonder if anybody has yet to tread this path.
I have been using CL at on my school's cluster. I usually develop within Slime locally, then move it to the cluster's master node and have a trial run over a remote Slime session, then once everything works, I ditch Slime and invoke my programs on the worker nodes using a bash or Lisp script (yes, we are running without a queue; crazy, huh?). I would very much like to use dispatch the jobs to the worker nodes from within Slime. More to the point, I would like to be able to start jobs on the worker nodes from my Slime connection to the master node. Now, of course I can connect to each node using a tunnel and start the jobs that way, but I want an automated interface as sketched below.
It would certainly be nice to use Lisp/Slime on clusters. I haven't any real experience with this, but it seems to me that most clusters use some middleware like Torque to manage/configure nodes and job queues. So is it necessary/desirable to interact with the middleware?
[...]
Almost all of this would be on the Swank side (and thank goodness because I feel like a fish out of water in ELisp). However, I have already had trouble understanding the Slime message protocol. I'll figure it out eventually, but are there any good internals guides for Slime/Swank?
Not really; there are some comments in slime.el that might be useful. Other than that, the *slime-events* buffer contains a log of the messages between Emacs <-> Lisp which at least plenty of examples for real interactions. Remote debugging is the most complicated issue, but I guess you don't need that initially.
Helmut