[Beowulf] What services do you run on your cluster nodes?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 03:20:15PM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> The fundamental problem is (as Don said as well) that as far as I know
> there ARE NO really good solutions to the problem of the representation,
> encapsulation, and transmission of hierarchical data structures in a
> portable and efficient way.  If you know of one, please correct me

As I said previously, there aren't. But in many cases, domain-specific
files work better. For example, many people use Python's ConfigParser
for configuration files. That's much, much more human-readable and
writable than XML, and it doesn't need XML's hierarchy features, nor
the huge libraries that go with reading XMl.

A way to express hierarchy is NOT an obvious win, because you often
have to change your source code that's consuming the data if you
change your hierarchy. Sure, you can express it, but adding new levels
can be annoyingly expensive.

> In this PARTICULAR case, I prefer to let the output speak for itself:

Looks like unreadable crap to me. If this is a good example, it
doesn't lend much of a positive spin to your rant.

-- greg