Kicking it old school...

I

  spend a lot of time talking about developing grid enabled software, and certainly our critically acclaimed SDK is aimed at making that process easy. We love our API (and our customers do, too).

I spend less time, however, talking about our ease-of-use with respect to traditional distributed computing: good old CLI. Certainly most distributed computing to date has involved moving a command-line application to many machines, running it (sometimes with different arguments or input files), then putting the results somewhere.

It's old school, but it's important. And it's also important that you can do it without having to learn how to program or write perl scripts. Earlier today I read Joe Landman's post about Microsoft's entree into HPC. He certainly has many valid points (Joe's a smart guy, and one of the smartest when it comes to clustering), but on one thing I definitely disagree: HPC has historically been too difficult for many users, and needless complexity has indeed been a hindrance to adoption. I've had customers tell me this directly. You have to remember: not everyone knows how to write scripts or use a compiler.

To that end, I recently made a short video that shows how to create and submit a command line job to the Digipede Network using our Workbench tool. This isn't a glitzy video; it simply shows how easy it is to run a command line job on our system. I linked to this page earlier today, but (coincidentally) the video just went up a few minutes ago. To find the video, click here then scroll down to "Submitting a Command-Line Job with Digipede Workbench."

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