Rationale behind "Unisys is easier to program"

Alan Grimes alangrimes at starpower.net
Thu Feb 22 08:51:27 PST 2001


The person who responded to my statement that Unisys was easier to
program assumed that I still intended to use MPI/PVM in some fassion on
the Massively multiprocessing Unisys system. That is not the case... I
could not even get PVM to function in any way whatsoever even after
buying a book on it (one of my biggest peves against the system),
Actually what I mean by this is that I tried to help a BSD user up in
Canada to get a system up among his personal systems... We couldn't do
it. 

The key feature of the Unisys system is that it is just an advanced
multiprocessor architecture. That means I do not need PVM/MPI at all, I
can just use PThreads and write code saying "run this on all available
processors". This code could be identical for machines with any number
of processors and still function correctly depending on how efficient
the synchronization method is. The User is much happier with this system
because he can just run a program on one OS without having to worry
about multiple installations or Net-booting.

Besides, in the unisys machine you are paying something on the order of
$2,500 for each processor because it has 4mb of cache...

-- 
Those who go to buildings with high celings to find a spirit know what
was
left out of ther own composition. I pitty them. =\
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