[slime-devel] Slime and clusters

[Helmut Eller]

* Zach Kost-Smith [2011-10-19 16:20] writes:

> I wonder if anybody has yet to tread this path.
>
> I have been using CL at on my school's cluster.  I usually develop within
> Slime locally, then move it to the cluster's master node and have a trial run
> over a remote Slime session, then once everything works, I ditch Slime and
> invoke my programs on the worker nodes using a bash or Lisp script (yes, we
> are running without a queue; crazy, huh?).  I would very much like to use
> dispatch the jobs to the worker nodes from within Slime.  More to the point,
> I would like to be able to start jobs on the worker nodes from my Slime
> connection to the master node.  Now, of course I can connect to each node
> using a tunnel and start the jobs that way, but I want an automated interface
> as sketched below.

It would certainly be nice to use Lisp/Slime on clusters.  I haven't any
real experience with this, but it seems to me that most clusters use
some middleware like Torque to manage/configure nodes and job queues.
So is it necessary/desirable to interact with the middleware?

[...]

> Almost all of this would be on the Swank side (and thank goodness because I
> feel like a fish out of water in ELisp).  However, I have already had trouble
> understanding the Slime message protocol.  I'll figure it out eventually, but
> are there any good internals guides for Slime/Swank?

Not really; there are some comments in slime.el that might be useful.
Other than that, the *slime-events* buffer contains a log of the
messages between Emacs <-> Lisp which at least plenty of examples for
real interactions.  Remote debugging is the most complicated issue, but
I guess you don't need that initially.

Helmut