Richard Gooch writes:
> 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,
Obviously this is a feature people want.
> 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.
Message passing can be more costly! On the hardware I develop for,
a "message" involves setting up some DMA control data. Distributed
shared memory has a one-time setup cost, so it is faster for
frequent access to small bits of data.
You could really mess up performance by using a message-passing API
for repeated random access to 8-byte values. Actually, I think the
break-even point is near 2 kB.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 03 2000 - 22:58:51 EST