Readme

What

This dinky little script implements Conway's Game of Life using the locator LEDs of blades in a Cisco UCS cluster.

Why

This script was inspired by the concept of Blinkenlights, particularly by the implementation of Conway's Game of Life on Connection Machines.

How

To use this script you must have at least version 0.031 of the Cisco::UCS module installed in addition to at least version 0.05 of the Game::Life module.

You will also need to edit the script so as to specify your UCS cluster information (hostname, username and password) and you will also likely need to modify the script to specify you physical chassis arrangement.

For example - to configure the script for your cluster of four chassis arranged in a two-by-two arrangement like so:

+-chassis 1   +-chassis 3
v             v          
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
|  1  |  2  | |  1  |  2  |
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
|  3  |  4  | |  3  |  4  |
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
|  5  |  6  | |  5  |  6  |
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
|  7  |  8  | |  7  |  8  |
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
|  1  |  2  | |  1  |  2  |
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
|  3  |  4  | |  3  |  4  |
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
|  5  |  6  | |  5  |  6  |
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
|  7  |  8  | |  7  |  8  |
+-----+-----+ +-----+-----+
^             ^
+-chassis 2   +- chassis 4

You would modify the script like so:

$u = [ 
       [ '1:1', '1:2', '3:1', '3:2' ],
       [ '1:3', '1:4', '3:3', '3:4' ],
       [ '1:5', '1:6', '3:5', '3:6' ],
       [ '1:7', '1:8', '3:7', '3:8' ],
       [ '2:1', '2:2', '4:1', '4:2' ],
       [ '2:3', '2:4', '4:3', '4:4' ],
       [ '2:5', '2:6', '4:5', '4:6' ],
       [ '2:7', '2:8', '4:7', '4:8' ]
     ];

See the script comments for further details.

Note that this script will work best (only?) if your chassis are fully-populated and arranged as a square or rectangular shape.

When you have configured the script for your environment, the script will run for 20 generations with a three second gap between each generation.

Note that there may be some delay between all lights updating for each generation due to the delay of UCSM actioning the led action.

In addition to blinking lights on your UCS cluster, the script will also output a simple textual representation of the current game board.