"Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> said:
> Richard Gooch writes:
[...]
> > Ach! Not another DSM project :-( Don't do it. There's already a DSM
> > implementation for Linux,
> Obviously this is a feature people want.
Right. Can't be done efficiently right now doesn't stop wishing on a star.
> > and besides, you're better off with a message-passing interface.
> > That way application coders can see how costly operations are.
> > Using DSM hides that, resulting in inefficient code.
> Message passing can be more costly! On the hardware I develop for,
> a "message" involves setting up some DMA control data. Distributed
> shared memory has a one-time setup cost, so it is faster for
> frequent access to small bits of data.
Your machines have ESP to know without message passing that a shared piece
of data was changed in the other corner of the room?
> You could really mess up performance by using a message-passing API
> for repeated random access to 8-byte values. Actually, I think the
> break-even point is near 2 kB.
Then don't use message passing for that.
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