borednet: a passtime for idle computers

How it works:

A jobber contacts a dealer, tells it ``I'm bored'', and gets back either a job or a referral to another dealer that might have work. The job, if it gets one, takes the form of an idel object file plus a tag that's unique among all the jobs from that dealer. The jobber runs the job (at high niceness and with limits on the total space and time consumed) then makes a new connection to the dealer and sends back the output with the tag. (Currently there's no limit on the amount of output except what's inherent in the runtime limit. This will be fixed.)

There's an exponential backoff from any hosts the jobber can't successfully contact and get a job from. (It doubles the time interval between each failing attempt.)

A dealer keeps a list of tasks to work on (each task being divisible into jobs), plus a list of jobs sent out but not yet completed. The dealer code needs more work to be realistically useful -- keeping track of which jobs failed and need to be reissued, and which ones should have finished by now but haven't, communicating with other dealers about available tasks in order to get referrals, sending out jobs redundantly for cross-checking, and so on.

A task is an object you create to put your jobs onto borednet. factoring-task.py is an example; the methods you need to write are explained in the doc strings there.

To try this out:

1. Either install idel with `make install' from the main directory of this distribution, or just build it with `make' and then edit the paths in the variables at the top of jobber.py and dealer.py to refer to idelvm and idelasm in the main directory. (I should automate this, obviously.)

2. To run the example job dealer, go into this directory and enter:

$ python factoring-task.py

3. To run a jobber client, start up a new shell and enter:

$ python jobber.py localhost

This should result in factoring-task eventually printing "11 factors 121" amidst debugging messages. Not too thrilling yet...

General apology:

I'm still fairly new at network code -- this borednet implementation is much more amateurish than the main idel code. Suggestions and improvements are welcome.