Machine clusters & Axiom (was: Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: [Gcl-devel] gcl sockets)

[David MENTRE]

Hello Tim,

root <address@hidden> writes:

> (b) in the long term there is a sub-effort to put Axiom on a beowulf.
>     I have access to a 128 node cluster with 2Ghz processors on each node.
>     Of course getting Axiom running in small-grain parallel mode (as 
>     opposed to an independent Axiom on each node) is a hard problem
>     on its own. I've done some initial experiments with a matrix domain
>     (parallel matrix multiply) but not much since then. I was hoping to
>     have a student to work on this but that fell thru.

As a side note, I've done my PhD in a research team looking at those
cluster issues (and my own PhD was on the shared memory topic). I doubt
that you can gain any speedup on a beowulf-like cluster for fine grain
computations, due to high cost of communications (to much latency, to
little bandwidth). However, coarse grain parallelism (e.g. one long
Axiom computation par node) seems to me much more doable.

Yours,
d.
-- 
David MENTRE <address@hidden> -- http://www.nongnu.org/axiom/