GRASS on Beowulf

[Andreas Lange]

Matt.Wilkie wrote:
> 
> As I recall, ORNL's Beowulf (the Stone Souper Computer) used
> GRASS to build a continental US ecoregion map, among other
> things.
> http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/
> 
> cheers,
> 
> -matt

Hi,

i read the very interesting page of this project:
http://research.esd.orln.gov/~hnw/esri98/

But as far as i understand they used GRASS only to rasterize the digital
maps (on a normal, single CPU PC?).

The "iterative convergent procedure" and the principal component
analysis was done with specialized software that uses the parallel
supercomputers. 

The author states on the pages that parallel computing needs a
completely different approach to problems/programming. 

I think that using parallel algorithms needs a complete re-design and
re-thinking of libraries. Only recompiling with a special compiler will
not give any performance increase.

cu

Andreas

-- 
Andreas Lange, 65187 Wiesbaden, Germany, Tel. +49 611 807850
Andreas.Lange at Rhein-Main.de, A.C.Lange at GMX.net