Parallel programming

[Mark Lane]

Peter wrote:
> Look for "PI calculus", "API calculus" and "deadlock-free algorythms" and
> "non-blocking synchronization". These are more or less they keys to parallel
> computing. Mosix is a well known implementation of distributed computing that
> runs  on Linux (too) and it has a lot of documentation. The Ada and Java common
> programming languages have native parallel processing support (of some sort).
> Someone on this list ran a small cluster for graphics I think, I believe that he
> gave it up (I believe it was William Park). The subject is huge and I am not an
> expert :)
>
>   
Mosix is an older design and basically allows individual threads to be 
moved to or started on free nodes. It doesn't use message passing. 
Basically it's good if you have a lot of serial processes to run. I was 
going to say it doesn't support newer hardware but it looks like it's 
caught up now and runs on modern 2.6 Kernels. I don't know how well it 
will work with large datasets but you may be able to combine it with GFS 
to improve performance there.
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