The use of a beowulf.

[Bohn Christopher A Capt AFRL/IFSD]

>From the Beowulf Mailing List FAQ (
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~uthayopa/bwfaq2.html
<http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~uthayopa/bwfaq2.html> )
 
3. Can I take my software and run it on a Beowulf and have it go faster?
[1999-05-13]

Maybe, if you put some work into it. You need to split it into
parallel tasks that communicate using MPI or PVM or network sockets or
SysV IPC. Then you need to recompile it.

Or, as Greg Lindahl points out, if you just want to run the same
program a few thousand times with different input files, a shell script
will suffice.

As Christopher Bohn points out, even multi-threaded software won't
automatically get a speedup; multi-threaded software assumes
shared-memory. There are some distributed shared memory packages under
development (DIPC, Mosix, ...), but the memory access patterns in
software written for an SMP machine could potentially result in a
*loss* of performance on a DSM machine.



-----Original Message-----
From: Geoffroy Doucet [mailto:doucetg@nortelnetworks.com]
Sent: Monday, June 21, 1999 4:36 PM
To: beowulf@beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov
Subject: The use of a beowulf.


It is possible to use a beowulf without rewrite the application? Please let
me know. 

Tanks. 


-- Geoffroy Doucet 
Unix Support 
Nortel Networks 
Montreal Nuns Island 
Phone : 514-732-2555 
E-Mail : doucetg@nortelnetworks.com <mailto:doucetg@nortelnetworks.com>