Written by Ram Rachum, developer of GarlicSim.
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My first cloud bomb
In the last month I’ve been working on a few things for GarlicSim:
PiCloudCruncher: A cruncher that crunches the simulation on the cloud instead of the local computer, using PiCloud.- A “Crunching controls” widget, which will allow to easily change cruncher type and crunching options in the GUI.
- Better keyboard shortcuts in the GUI.
The cloud thing is really exciting. Aaron Staley, CTO of PiCloud, helped me a lot along the way in using PiCloud. I already have a very prototype-ish version of PiCloudCruncher working. It’s still very crude, but being able to run a simulation on a cloud from a GUI environment was exciting. It will probably be officially released by the end of this year as GarlicSim 0.6.
By the way, when working with PiCloud I accidentally created my first cloud bomb. A process bomb is when you accidentally create a process that creates several processes that create several processes… <infinite loop> until your computer dies of a million processes and you try to kill them faster than they multiply, or alternatively restart your computer. A cloud bomb is when you create a cloud job that creates a cloud job that creates a cloud job… And that’s exactly what I did. Killing that bomb was a bit tricky but eventually I succeeded. I’m lucky that I made a “linear” cloud bomb and not an exponential one; If each cloud job would have created multiple cloud jobs, I don’t know how I would have stopped it, short of calling my credit card company to cancel my credit card :)
Stay tuned for more news about GarlicSim and PiCloudCruncher.
