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From: schang@netcom.UUCP (Sehyo Chang)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Multiprocessing in your own PC lab
Message-ID: <11572@netcom.UUCP>
Date: 2 May 90 16:27:19 GMT
References: <0093608E.3DCAF480@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU> <3841@munnari.oz.au> <E!sw=m7@cs.psu.edu>
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In article <E!sw=m7@cs.psu.edu> schwartz@numenor.endor.cs.psu.edu (Scott E. Schwartz) writes:
>In article <3841@munnari.oz.au> steve@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Steve Mabbs) writes:
>
>>Doug Mohney writes:
>>>Couldn't you take a room full of workstations or PCs and (through the
>>>appropriate software) treat them as a one big parallel processing
>
>>I have collected the following list of parallel programming packages
>>over the net recently.  Some of them may also be applicable.  Anyone care to
>>comment?
>>
>>Cosmic	- ?
>
>The Cosmic Environment, from Caltech.  This basically gives you the
>same development environment for your network of workstations as you
>get on an Intel hypercube.  It's very easy to use, but it can be
>fragile when faced with process/host/network failures.

The cosmic environment running on workstation is just simulator.  That
means you can't spawn process across another workstation which is idle.
There might be new version of cosmic which might let you hook up 
multiple workstation.  Also cosmic is available for symult s2010

Basically, cosmic provide fully connected network of CSP processes point
of view to programmer(even though underlying topology might be 
hypercube,ethernet,etc).  Basic modes of communication is through
message passing.  The message send is asynchrous while message receive
can be both synchrous and asynchrous.  One of the problem with cosmic
was that it didn't provide transparent byte-ordering(user have to
translate each message to host's byte order format).


-- 
Sehyo Chang						schang@netcom.uucp
Ascent Logic Corp.			  ucvbax!ames!claris!netcom!schang
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