[Spread-users] Managing elections with Spread

[Alex Bligh]

Assuming I can actually address my the machines, it looks like Spread
will save me a lot of work. One other task, which I am sure must be
a very common distributed computing task, is election of a small fixed
number of nodes out of a total pool to perform a particular task.
EG suppose that there are X nodes, each of which is CAPABLE of
doing job type P, and are thus joined to the spread group C(P).
At any one time, we require exactly Y nodes actually DOING this job,
where Y<=X. Each of the X nodes Xi (1<=i<=X) has a weight W(P,i) which
is its unsuitability to perform the job. I wish the members of the
group C(P) to select those Y members with minimum weight W(P,i)
in some atomic way, and make them members of a second spread group (say
J(P) ), or have their election status stored within Spread in some
manner. I can't help but think this problem has been solved before
and doesn't need me to rewrite it. Any ideas?

Alex