Re: parallelism

[glen e. p. ropella]

At 01:07 AM 3/28/00 +0100, you wrote:
> Does any capacity for parallel processing exist in Swarm at
> the moment?  Surely the ability to execute schedules
> concurrently enables some degree of parallelism?

Yep!  You're right!  Swarm is at least as parallelizable as any
C program.  All one need do is wrap up some socket calls or some
thread primitives, or use MPI or PVM to distribute runs.

The concurrency of the Activity library does help in this
regard because it helps the modeler *think* concurrently, which
would help in parallelization of a model.  (But, you have to
realize that just because our interface claims concurrency, does
not mean that we're claiming parallelism.  In fact, by telling
two actions to run concurrently, you're only saying that they
aren't dependent on each other....you're not actually specifying
how their sequentiality.... only their dependency.)

But, that's as far as we go, yet, to help the modeler write a
parallel model.  And many of our users, don't have the
programming or systems background that allows them to use
the underlying features of C to parallelize their models.

So, when we talk about "adding parallelism", we're really talking
about adding higher level functionality to assist our community
in writing parallel models.  So, the proper way to say it is
that "We don't yet *support* parallelism beyond the logical
model of concurrency."

glen

--
glen e. p. ropella =><= The front line is everywhere. Hail Eris!
Home: http://forager.swarm.com/~gepr              (505) 424-0448
Work: http://www.swarm.com                        (505) 995-0818


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