hi, you wrote---"Any thoughts? Ideas? Are you going to toss me off the ship yet?" we're behind you 100%. i've been trying to do this with limited support for some time now. and i know personally there are half a dozen others with similar aspirations/needs. it's made the difference between being able to participate at some level vs. being left out of the game entirely. and overall it's been a positive experience. so, formalizing something for this setup would be great. i think your idea of a core node and auxilliary node is great. we've been working on a similar model here at Dartmouth, as we experiment with different size and format events, and try to streamline our equipment and room configurations. i (and all the rest of us) look forward to seeing what you come up with. i'd be happy to contribute our (ongoing) experiences if that helps. -gurcharan ========== Gurcharan S. Khanna Associate Director Research Computing Dartmouth College http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rc/accessgrid --- "Ivan R. Judson" wrote: Hey all, I'll be working in the next few weeks on a written definition of AG Node Requirements. This will mostly be formalizing alot of the information we already have. This will shake out what it is we expect the current 4 machine node to do. Defining what this functionality is, and building the API's for each component will let us explore this kind of idea without impacting the current operating schedule of the AG (ie, we're way too successful to have people randomly breaking nodes for experiments). One part of this is to define "Core Node Functionality" and "Auxillary Node Functionality". This is the line between what a minimum node is (the Core Functionality) and what a cool far out node might include (microscopes, milling machines, mood indicators, whatever). If you have ideas for what you might augment a node with, please send those to me so I can include them as examples... Any thoughts? Ideas? Are you going to toss me off the ship yet? --Ivan --- end of quote ---