Practical Unix Programming:
A Guide to Concurrency, Communication, and Multithreading
by Kay. A. Robbins and Steven Robbins
Chapter 11:
Project: Not Too Parallel Virtual Machine
Grace Murray Hopper, a vocal early advocate
of parallel computing, was fond of reminding
her audiences that the way to pull a heavier load
was not to grow a bigger ox. The prospect of
harnessing cheap workstations to solve large problems
has become increasingly appealing, but the difficulties
in providing software to coordinate the activity
of these machines continues to prevent widespread use.
PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) provides a high-level,
but not transparent, system for a user to coordinate
tasks spread across workstations on a network.
This project
compares two approaches for implementing the Not Too
Parallel Virtual Machine (NTPVM) dispatcher, a simplified
PVM system. The
multithreaded approach makes the logic cleaner and enhances
parallelism.
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