Re: Why GNU Mach is so different?

[Eray Ozkural (exa)]

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On Tuesday 08 January 2002 00:06, Farid Hajji wrote:
>
> Of course, one can always simulate multicasting or avoid it completely.
> That is not a big issue.
>

Being a parallel programming person: the whole point of multicast is low 
level support in network so that collective communications attain favorable 
speedups. IOW, it is similar to a multi-port communication model whereas such 
a simulation that you mention would make your collective communications 
single-port.

Note that very few distributed systems make use of IP multicast. There is a 
good reason for this: multicasting is not yet reliable. However, it is said 
that multicast works reasonably well in IPv6. I haven't tested that myself.

Another reason why multicasting is not exploited too much may be the 
following: the kind of multicasting the IP people talk about is things like 
streaming video broadcast over long distances whereas parallel/distributed 
people would like something that would give them a very efficient way to do a 
broadcast/scatter/gather/reduce etc.

Thanks,

- -- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo
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