OStatic

Bryan Che, part of the project management team at Red Hat, started a new project at Fedora this week called Nightlife. Based on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Condor Project, Nightlife will give people the ability "to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power."

The Condor Project has been in active development since 1988. Last year, Red Hat signed an agreement that allowed Condor's code to be released under an OSI-approved license so Fedora was able to include it in its own distribution. Since then, the two entities have worked together "to add enhanced enterprise stability and functionality to Condor, add high throughput computing capabilities to Linux, and ultimately advance and strengthen the Condor project and community."

Che says he hopes Nightlife will eventually help to build over a million nodes at Fedora, but there are a few things that need to happen first -- mainly to determine what the requirements will be to run on Nightlife. At the bare minimum, they will need to be open source, safe, and have an open source-centric policy around the results.

According to Che, the project will "focus on growing the Nightlife community of projects and solicit Fedora users to donate capacity. Hopefully, enabling donation of compute power to Nightlife can eventually become a first-boot option for Fedora installs." To learn more about Fedora Nightlife, join the mailing list or visit the IRC channel at #fedora-nightlife on irc.freenode.net.

• Fedora
• Red Hat
• condor project
• nightlife