1-to-1 connections & possibly hidden nodes

Roberto Ostinelli <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.erlang.general
Message-ID <CAFXp3L+zLJ=A840wJOf72cZWOcxh=oaWceTx3qMFe+b79FWUfQ@mail.gmail.com>
All,
Is it possible to have a 1-to-1 connection from a node in a cluster to a
single Erlang node which does _not_ connect to the mesh, but only to a very
specific Erlang node?

I've go a very CPU-heavy application and am trying to find ways to offload
the CPU computations to Erlang nodes (tha don't need to be in a cluster,
except for a single box they refer to).

Basically something like this:

<NODE A in cluster> --------- <NODE B in cluster>
        \                     /
         \                   /
          \                 /
          <NODE B in cluster>
           *       *       *
          *        *        *
         *         *         *
      <NODE B1> <NODE B2> <NODE B>

The distributed cluster is composed of nodes A, B and C, but nodes B1, B2
and B3 can communicate directly with node B and that node only. Node B can
offload CPU computations to B1, B2, B3 by sending erlang messages to them
and receive results back.

Every node in the cluster needs ~50x the CPU power, therefore I'm trying to
avoid having the standard cluster grow so big that it would be generating
way too much noise in a full mesh network (especially since it really isn't
needed).

I can of course use a simple custom TCP binary channel, but was wandering
if something already exists that I could leverage. I've seen that hidden
nodes "Hidden nodes always establish hidden connections to all other nodes
except for nodes in the same global group" [1] so if I understand this
correctly nodes B1-3 would still connect to A and B, even though the
cluster wouldn't know about them.

Thank you for any considerations you might have,
r.

 [1] http://erlang.org/doc/man/erl.html
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.