local and remote cpu resources and the acme model of interaction

[Gary Capell gary@staff.cs.su.oz.au]

> where should acme be run ?

on the terminal

> if i run it on the terminal, then i end up
> compiling there.
not if you type 'mk' in a window connnected to the cpu server.
Similarly you could use acme for development on non-plan9
machines you're connected to.

>  if i run it on the cpu server, then the server is
> doing a lot of the little jobs that the terminal was so good at.
yup


> perhaps, given the rising power of the terminals, this is now a moot
> point - i would guess that an r4000 is capable of running the compiler
> when necessary (even if it only has a relatively slow connection to
> the fileserver), but then when would i use the cpu server ?  and,
> perhaps more importantly, how does it fit into acme's model of
> interaction ?

We've been asking similar questions at Basser.  We have Pentium 90
terminals, and our R3000 cpu server and the terminals have exactly the same
connection (ethernet) to the file server.  Previously the cpu server
was useful for RAM-intensive jobs (the plan9 linker seems to need ridiculous
amounts of it), but with 32M terminals, that's not a problem either :-)
I hardly ever use the cpu server.

Eventually we hope to get our two DEC alphas working as cpu server
and file server with a dedicated FDDI link.  Then it might be worth
the effort of going to the cpu server.  A multiprocessor cpu server
would be good also.