thanks! :) Looks like that might help for part of it but... the more I think about this the more I want the p2p job scheduler.

One idea that looks like it might have hope is:

• A message bus (possibly POE::Component::MessageQueue) that will allow job queuing, job statuses, etc to be communicated to the N nodes
• Static job list, statuses, etc via a replicated db. Possibly using Net::CouchDB - this would also be used as the backend to provide statuses to a front end of some sort (web or similar).
• Configuration of the peer job 'servers' via a simple ini file (Config::Simple)

Thoughts on this hair brained idea?

My thoughts would be that you'd probably save yourself a lot of effort by setting up ssh keys on each system and doing all the work on the main site. That way you don't have to do nearly as much synchronization and maintaining of multiple running instances that all need to communicate. Just use remote ps calls, remote run your apps (which makes them local instances sort of) and check /proc/loadavg for system load info. Don't make things harder than you have to. Then the only actual hard part you need to write is the part that decides when to use which computer and how to decide your resource allocation. (my code also handles time based allocation i.e. don't run until at least 4pm)

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