[Beowulf] Status of beowulf.org?

[Joe Landman]

On 06/15/2012 06:49 PM, Bill Broadley wrote:
> On 06/15/2012 12:25 PM, Jan Wender wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Arend from Penguin replied and they are looking for the list. They would
>> like to continue hosting the list, but would ask for some volunteers to
>> administrate it.
>
> Well if they are doing such a poor job and aren't willing to
> administrate it we should move it elsewhere.

Hmmm  ... I pinged my contact within Penguin and was told they were 
working on it.  This said, I seem to remember that beowulf.org was Scyld 
property before the acquisition by Penguin.  Looking at the whois output 
somewhat confirms ownership.

If this is the case, "we" can't move it "elsewhere" without the owners 
(Penguin's) permission.

I think that part of why its fallen by the wayside at Penguin is due to 
Don taking up residence at Nvidia, and no one either stepping up to it 
or being assigned to it.

All of this said, if a reasonable proposal is made to Penguin about 
helping to run/administer it, I think they might be willing to consider 
it.  If, on the other hand, it is approached in a somewhat more brusque 
manner, I wouldn't hold a refusal to consider proposals against them.

So far, we, Chris Samuel, Doug Eadline, Jon A, and a few others have 
indicated a willingness to help.  I can't say I like mailman very much 
(set many up, royal PIA to deal with IMO), but Chris Samuel has good 
mailman-foo.  Might make sense to enable admin by Chris and a small 
group of mailman-gurus.  I've got (whether I like it or not) web-foo ... 
and mail server foo ... and would be happy to help there.  Doug/Jon/... 
have foo of all sorts, and would certainly help out.  If we needed 
distributed carbon-bots for moderation, this is doable (Chris might be 
able to comment on this).

We would (my company) be happy to setup/donate a small server with 
storage to run this if Penguin wants to get completely out.  We could 
host it as well at our site.  Could also run it on EC2, though I can 
tell you that this is not nearly as cheap as Amazon might wish you to 
think.  The cost benefit doesn't really work so well for this ...

Lots of possibilities.

Seems to me though, that one of the natural leaders of this would be 
Doug Eadline.  Don't know where ClusterMonkey sits, but that is a well 
run site.

Just sayin...

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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