Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!hubcap!avsd!childers
From: avsd!childers@decwrl.dec.com (Richard Childers)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Re: Looking for a message passing package to run on the Sun
Message-ID: <6489@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 18 Sep 89 12:56:57 GMT
Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu
Lines: 38
Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu

baden@lbl-csam.arpa (Scott Baden [CSR/Math]) writes:

>I'd like to tie together our local bevvy of suns into a multicomputer
>for solving scientific problems. I need simple facilties to
>fork off processes and to handle message passing.
>Are there any software packages out there in netland to do this?

I recall reading about a remote execution daemon that had been developed
experimentally a few years ago ... at UC Berkeley.

I recall reading about it in the USENIX journal, oh, about three years ago.

I'll bet a few hours skimming through old USENIX journals might benefit
you. As I recall, the daemon, when given a job, polled the network to see
what machines weren't busy and passed the job out to appropriate servers,
also running this daemon. When they were done, it was returned.

I think it didn't fly because the overhead was too high, networking and on
the machines that ran the daemon, to make it cost-effective in the environment
it was conceived in. But it would still seem like the ideal core for a loose
approach to multiprocessing, provided you had a front end that was capable
of dividing the task up into independent pieces that could be processed w/o
dependencies ....

>	Scott B. Baden
>
>	Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
>	Berkeley, California
>	baden@csam.lbl.gov
>	...!ucbvax!csam.lbl.gov!baden

-- richard

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