[ome-devel] cluster support

[Jeremy Muhlich]

What is the state of cluster support in OME?  Our university provides a
cluster managed by LSF and a shared webhosting system, and I'm trying to
figure out how much of their shared webhosting infrastructure I can
leverage for OME.  

The main sticking point is that the webserver box isn't supposed to do
too much real work itself.  Compute-intensive jobs are supposed to be
submitted to the cluster for (asynchronous) processing.  I'm hoping I
can get mexes running solely on the cluster nodes without too much
modification to the existing code.  Has anyone tried anything like this
before, or is there at least a sense of how hard it would be to make the
necessary modifications?  

Also, is the image server more cpu bound or I/O bound?  I could
technically have every call to the omeis cgi scheduled on the cluster,
but the job dispatch delay can be up to 30 seconds which pretty much
kills interactivity.  Would omeis play nice on an otherwise
lightly-loaded shared webserver, or might it soak up too much cpu
time?  


 -- Jeremy