Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!CS.BROWN.EDU!jb
From: jb@CS.BROWN.EDU (Jim Bloom)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.encore
Subject: Re: Need user impressions of Encore Multimax
Message-ID: <8803031616.AA28564@archer.cs.brown.edu>
Date: 3 Mar 88 16:16:41 GMT
References: <690@hqda-ai.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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The computer science dept. at Brown Univ. has a 12 processor machine.
The machine is being used primarily for research, but there is a class
doing some work with parallel programming using it (ten students).
We generally have only a few users at a time.  The machine is generally
reliable.  The software has a few bugs (but I haven't seen any vendor
yet that didn't have some).

One research project is working on supporting parallel computation.
We have developped a system for using multiple processors to perform
a calculation.  Our work has yield a package which provides a runtime
system for parallel computation.  This code is currently a library
that could easily be used to provide the basis of a parallelizing
compiler.  As far as writing programs, the programmer must understand
where the possibility of parallelism exists and how to make the best
use of it.  C is supported currently and Fortran is very close to
completion.  Also, this currently only works under the BSD based
system and not the Sys V version.

To answer your questions more directly:  Yes, the multiple processors
may be used for a single program.  I do not know of any compilers available
from Encore that parallelize the code.  As such, you will need to do it
yourself.  Our code will be available from Encore in the near future.

				Jim Bloom
				Brown University