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Date:      Fri, 19 Jan 2001 10:00:20 -0700
From:      Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
To:        "Russell L. Carter" <rcarter@pinyon.org>
Cc:        Uwe Pierau <uwe.pierau@tu-clausthal.de>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Clustering FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <3A6872A4.C61233C0@softweyr.com>
References:  <20010119054115.EA8F66A@pinyon.org>

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"Russell L. Carter" wrote:
> 
> %Uwe Pierau wrote:
> %>
> %> Jamie Heckford wrote:
> %> # Hi,
> %> # Does anyone have any details of Open Source, or software included
> %> # with FreeBSD that allows the clustering of FreeBSD?
> %>
> %> Maybe you mean something like this...
> %>           http://acme.ecn.purdue.edu/index.html
> %> ?!
> %
> %Yes!
> %
> %When is somebody going to get around to making a PVM version of make?
> %Wouldn't that help those "build world" times a bit?
> 
> No it would not!  Back in '94 I ported dmake to FreeBSD
> and built just about every numerics package out there
> on a 4 CPU cluster.  Worked fine, but not much in overall
> speedup, because... tadum! Where do you get the source
> files, and how do you get the objs back :-)  Not low
> latency, eh?  F-Enet then, G-Enet now :)

You need a better file server.  My previous employer, where the software
staff recompiles 3 million lines of code 20 or 30 times a day, employs
pmake and a farm of Sun Ultra-5 workstations to parallelize their makes.
It allows them to complete a build in an hour that would take a single
Ultra-5 almost 20 hours to complete, even with 3 or 4 builds running in
parallel.  The network is 100BaseTX to the workstations and 1000BaseSX 
to the (NFS) fileserver.

> Nowadays, you'd want to "globus ify" things, rather than
> use use PVM.
> 
> But critically, speedup would only happen if jobs were
> allocated at a higher level than they are now.
> 
> Now for building something like a full version of TAO,
> why that might work.  But even then, a factor of 2x is
> unlikely until the dependencies are factored out at
> the directory level.

See the paper "Recursive Make Considered Harmful."  Make is an amazing
tool when used correctly.

-- 
            "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Wes Peters                                                         Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com                                           http://softweyr.com/


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