Re: More Ming fun.... :)

Justin Clift wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Pondering possibilities further.
> 
> Here's an interesting thought.  PHP compiled in CLI mode on a Unix box,
> then put into a "looks for input" loop and backgrounded.
> 
> The looking for input loop could be anything (i.e. waits on input from a
> TCP connection), and then generates output appropriately either directly
> to a remote flash object or perhaps locally to a filesystem.
You mentioned a TCP connection but I would imagine you hard code for
your fixed set of ip addresses in your lan.  
Otherwise you've got a HUGE SECURITY issue on your hands.
I wouldn't recommend anyone to write a piece of code that 
lets any kind of perl/php script run coming from a remote box.
It's a lot like some of the attacks that happened on the apache web server.
If the apache cgi directory permissions are configured incorrectly, this kind of
thing happened 
and it was a HUGE SECURITY issue.
I hope I am clear enough here.

> 
> Could be useful.  Tied to a database for data input and hmmm:
> 
>   + Periodically updated animated visualisation of data sets (i.e.
> weather, website hits (now THAT would be cool))
> 
>   + Visualisations based on extremely complex data (fractal zoom movies
> anyone?) that take a significant amount of time to generate.
> 
> Background processing and generation of Flash movies, with output in a
> webserver readable directory, sounds like it'd have many cool uses.
> Especially with an easy way to signal the background process PHP with
> instructions of what to do.
> 
> Might be a tie there to:
> 
> SRM (http://www.vl-srm.net) also looks useful for PHP, as it allows for
> persistant state keeping (i.e. instructions of what to do next).  (Not
> like sessions!)
> 
> ***
> 
> Distributed flash computing... hmmm.... lets say we get 5 PC's, and give
> them each a sequence of 1,000 frames to render (with appropriate data)
> using Ming + PHP.
> 
> As each frame is completed, they use flash remoting technology to send
> the data to a centralised Flash instance running somewhere and it
> assembles them on disk.  Not sure if the existing security mechanism
> would allow that (anyone?).
> 
> So, what technology would that take?  A browser and connection to the
> central flash (on the Net).  Lets see, 400+ Million people already have
> that in operation, and it's cross platform.  Usefulness?  Probably
> pretty specialised.  The CPU time saved would have to outway the data
> transfer time to make it work.
No matter what language you prefer php or whatever, you probably need an
infrastructure 
toolset like the following to help coordinate all your stuff.
Here is one example:
CLIC(lots of perl inside from what I read about it)
http://clic.mandrakesoft.com/index-en.html

There's also Beowulf but I don't have a link handy.

There's some java high performance computing sources if you're into java.
http://jhpc.nimkathana.com/hpjpc_book
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9653

I would imagine if you look around there must be an api for MPI and similar
infrastructures for php.

Cheers,
David Marceau