From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ish Rattan To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Subject: [9fans] Parallel computing and Plan9 Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 15:17:10 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: d22072dc-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Hello: I have been thinking about parallel programming under Plan9. Traditional way to write parallel program is to partition the task into a number of subtasks and control their execution-scheduling and communication among a number of autonomous systems. In Plan9 case, the above scenario does not hold. The computations are done on a cpu-server. If there is only one cpu-server then the parallel programming is no different form non-parallel case (except for concurrency control). Say there are two cpu-servers in a system: 1) can one distribute the computation on these cpu-servers? 2) what about the interaction between the distributed computation parts? I did not find any technique for a program to discover the cpu-servers in the system too. Multithreading/light-weight processes in the same computation do help but is not strictly speaking 'shared memory' or 'message passing' communication based parallel programming. So how does Plan9 fit in the parallel programming paradigm that uses cpu cycles from different cpus to reduce the computation time? I would like your comments, as I plan to pursue/explore this issue Fall semester. -ishwar