Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 3 Mar 2000 18:13:22 -0500 (EST) | From | "Richard B. Johnson" <> | Subject | Re: Help in DSM design |
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On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Richard Gooch wrote:
> mauro@alusis.ucb.edu.bo writes: > > Hi friends! > > > > I'm trying to develop a Dristributed Shared Memory sytem(DSM) using > > Linux. I was wondering myself if using IP for the protocol of the > > comunicationg nodes were correct?. I thing using IP will add so much > > bytes to the messages(actually packets) sent by the nodes. Will be > > better try another lighter protocol?. Could you also point me to > > other similar projects that are being develop? it will clear my > > ideas and help me with my problems > > Ach! Not another DSM project :-( Don't do it. There's already a DSM > implementation for Linux, and besides, you're better off with a > message-passing interface. That way application coders can see how > costly operations are. Using DSM hides that, resulting in inefficient > code. > > Regards, > > Richard....
Here somebody decided that the "ideal" way of doing a project was to have shared-memory between all the workstations so communications was "automatic". This was in the 10 mb/s days.
The result was like using a knotted string for memory. Update a single byte in shared memory and it has to go to all the workstations as a minimum-size packet. Then all the workstations have to send back a copy of their new memory image, etc. Necessary locking had the latency of the network, etc.
This is not something you really should do, even with a light-pipe. As Richard said, just send messages. It's quick, it's robust, and no locking issues exist (for the interface).
Cheers, Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.3.41 on an i686 machine (800.63 BogoMips).
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