Company computer utilization?

Erik Paulson epaulson at cs.wisc.edu
Wed Jul 17 12:36:47 PDT 2002


On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 11:49:16AM -0700, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 01:41:33PM -0500, Erik Paulson wrote:
> 
> > Or wait a few months, and use User-Mode-Linux on Win32, and just run the
> > Linux binaries. Use Condor to locate idle machines and temporarily install
> > "Linux"
> 
> Interesting. Clearly that'll work great for embarrassingly parallel
> programs, but what about MPI? Is there significant overhead in UML on
> Win32 for the ethernet?
> 

System calls are fairly painful under UML - the Linux version uses ptrace to
create the virtual machine.

We may be able to come up with something less painful under Win32 (for all it's
detractors, the Win32 API has some really cool calls)

I don't think UML is going to be a solution for people who are concerned about
squeezing every last byte out of their network cards, but for codes with low to
medium communications overhead it shouldn't be too bad.

-Erik



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