A good example of fork() is to look at Apache. If you start up apache, you will notice there are several Apache processes spawned. This is so that the webserver can handle each incoming connection. Furthermore if all the idle proceses suddenly become busy (lotsa traffic), Apache will fork off more apache processes to handle the increased load.
Now the MPI stuff I'm looking at takes the concept even a step further. Suppose instead of having alot of clients to serve, you instead had alot of data to process. OpenMPI is the Open Message Passing Interface, it is an efficient and modern implementation of the MPI standard. Supposed you had access to 10 physical servers, and you had a large data matrix to process. You could split the job up into several forks(), but the forks would only by default run on a single machine. Enter something like OpenMosix which allows you to cluster your linux boxes seamlessly and each fork'd process can now magically float off to the least active node for processing. But wait, wouldn't we be able to increase the computation speed if we not only offloaded the compute intensive processes to the least idle processor, but we also wrote our application so all of these forks kinda function as one and share messages back and forth as to what is going on and where they are in the process of computation? Thats why the MPI stuff, at least as I see it. Combined with OpenMosix, It allows you to implement what amounts to massively parallel computing. What you are seeing in my code there is a mistake it's a message to the Cluster to fire this code up on all available nodes and then shut it right back down again. On 10/19/06, Alex Esplin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Thanks for the input everyone. A day that I learn something new is usually a pretty good day. -- Alex Esplin /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
/* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
