Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!rsk
From: rsk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rich Kulawiec)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sequent
Subject: Re: What?  I'm confused. Sequent their strengths & weaknesses
Message-ID: <11500@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 8 Sep 89 22:46:24 GMT
References: <1263@syma.sussex.ac.uk> <1309@syma.sussex.ac.uk> <218@runxtsa.runx.oz> <17580@bellcore.bellcore.com> <5053@eos.UUCP>
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: rsk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rich Kulawiec)
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder
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In article <5053@eos.UUCP> eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) writes:
>In article <17580@bellcore.bellcore.com> johno@dduck.UUCP (John OBrien) writes:
>>The sequent architecture does automatic multiprocessing
>across the available processors.
>>The "Parallel Processing" is not done automatically!
>
>Oh?      What's the difference?  [*if you think this terminology is bad,
>I can refer you to other vendors with bad terminology...*]

Here's the deal:

If you and I each launch a dozen processes or so on a ten processor
machine, the kernel scheduler worries about which to run where, and
silently handles getting our 24 jobs done on 10 processors.

However, if I want to run a DSP application in parallel on 4 processors,
then I have to embed the appropriate parallel directives in my code
at compile-time, ie. the compilers won't generate parallel code for me.

---Rsk