About Nightlife
Fedora Nightlife is a project for creating a Fedora community grid. People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power. Given the large number of Fedora users, we hope to eventually be able to build a community grid of over a million nodes at Fedora. This will be a great example of the power of the Fedora community, give people new and meaningful ways to contribute to Fedora, advance the development of large-scale grid software, and lead to real benefits for the world.
A core part of Fedora Nightlife's mission will be to provide a complete open-source grid infrastructure suitable for computing a full spectrum of tasks. This includes:
- The core operating system and execution environments
- The necessary libraries for many workloads
- The workload scheduler
- Facilities for managing and enforcing various policies
- and so on
Fedora Nightlife will leverage the Condor project, which was created and hosted by the University of Wisconsin Madison, for scheduling and harnessing donated computing power. Last year, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin signed a strategic partnership around Condor. Part of this partnership entailed releasing Condor's source code under an OSI-approved open source license. As a result, we now have Condor packaged at Fedora, and upstream development continues to happen at the University of Wisconsin repository in an open manner.
How to Participate
- Join the Fedora Nightlife Mailing List
- Join the Fedora Nightlife Development List
- Join our IRC Channel on irc.freenode.net: #fedora-nightlife
We are just starting Nightlife, so any input or contribution you have for driving this project forward is welcome.
Proposing Projects for Nightlife
We still need to formalize a set of guidelines and process for how a project can take advantage of Nightlife for computation. Some of the requirements around a project will likely include:
- the applications to be executed must be open source (and likely packaged at Fedora)
- the project must have an active maintainer at Fedora
- the project must provide some kind of "good" (and definitely not be malicious or harmful)
- there should be some kind of open data policy
For now, until we have this well-defined, if you have a project that you'd like to propose for Nightlife, please e-mail the Nightlife mailing list to do so.