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From: HELLER@cs.umass.edu (Stride 440 User)
Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
Subject: CI (Cluster) I/O
Message-ID: <8701222310.AA21266@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Thu, 22-Jan-87 12:27:00 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8701222310.AA21266
Posted: Thu Jan 22 12:27:00 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Jan-87 20:36:31 EST
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    We have 4 VAX 750's (on a cluster with 5 other 750s and a pair of 780s)
and three DMA/UNIBUS graphics/image-processing devices. These three devices
are on three of the VAXen. Our researchers run large LISP systems (with
lowlever code in C or FORTRAN) to do computer vision research. Two or three
users running one of these systems is enough to bring a VAX 750 to its
knees. The problem is: these users would like to display results on one or
another of the graphics devices, but often they are on the "wrong" system
(they want to use device X, which is on VAX A, but they are are on VAX
C...). While it is posible to save the results to disk, exit and connect to
another VAX, this would tend to have everybody on one machine, which is just
too much for a VAX 750 to handle. One of the graphics devices (a Grinnell
GMR-270 w/DR11-W) is presently setup with a DECNet hack (using the Ethernet
the VAXen also have) to make it accessable from any machine. This is slow
and has problems (DECNet overhead precludes some operations). It also forces
us to use small I/O buffers (1400 bytes/700 words). The other two graphics
devices (a COMTAL VISION ONE/20 and a Gould DeAnza IP8500) want big I/O
buffers (16384 for the COMTAL and 65535 for the IP8500). DECNet/Ethernet
only allows about 1400 bytes for a user buffer.

    We would like to use the CI hardware to transfer data between the VAXen
and make the graphics devices either appear or be accessable from any node
on the cluster.  The problem is, DEC doesn't document how to do this.  The
"best" there is looking at the micro-fich of the DECNet/CI hack, which
doesn't really help much (has lots of weirdness for DECNet's use, but
which is not helpfull for what we want to do).

    Has anyone out there in Info-VAX-land figured out how to move large
chunks of data between cluster nodes (and no, I don't want to use a disk
buffer - this is for high-speed DMA graphics devices!)? I suspect I will
need to write some sort of class driver for the PAA0: (low-lever cluster I/O
driver) port driver (much like the DECNet "class" driver). Probably also
some sort of server-process and maybe a dummy device w/ACP, for user
programs to talk to.

		Robert Heller (VISIONS research group)
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