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From: ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.isis
Subject: Re: pmake problem and fix
Keywords: ISIS parallel-make bug-fix SunOS
Message-ID: <52327@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 21 Feb 91 17:40:44 GMT
References: <1991Feb21.101910@arp.anu.edu.au>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 40

In article <1991Feb21.101910@arp.anu.edu.au> gustav@arp.anu.edu.au (Zdzislaw Meglicki) writes:
> ...
>I, for that matter, intend to use it in my work. I would like to suggest
>various improvements though. In the first place, pmkexec should have
>some kind of a configuration file. You may have several different types
>of CPUs on the network. Even identical CPUs may have different versions
>of OS, or different versions of gcc or Fortran. The user should be able
>to tell pmkexec which particular CPUs of all mentioned in /usr/spool/isis/sites
>should be used for the compilation. Alternatively that information should
>be accessible through /usr/spool/isis/sites itself. Once the proper CPUs 
>are selected, the final decision as to which should be used should depend 
>not so much on the number of users on the given CPU but on the load. By the 
>way, the number of users is not 0 as described in the manual but 4, see line
>1522 of pmkexec.c. The note in the comment beneath that line indeed states:
>
>                   [...] We should either
>                   check for non-idle users, or wait until a proper rexec
>                   service which knows about load factors.
>
>In the meantime you can tinker with this particular part of the code by hand
>and make it check for specific hostnames or change numbers of users (I put
>it up immediately to 10).

These are good points.  Pmake was developed by a Masters student who
did his work and left Cornell to return to HP two years ago; since then,
nobody has worked on the program at all.

I hope that you, or other ISIS/pmake users will consider adapting the
program to use the V3.0 network resource manager (i.e. to select machines
to run on) and perhaps to extend its load balancing policies as you
suggest.  We will be happy to help out if you run into more problems.

The network resource manager is a "proper rexec service which knows about 
load factors", although it might need some extensions if pmake needs to get
access to those factors.  This is just the sort of thing we might be
willing to add, as long as the architecture of the resulting system is
clean and simple... and the extended pmake code becomes available to
other ISIS users, of course.

Ken