[GRASS-dev] [bug #5252] (grass) Multicore hardware and grass

[Māris Nartišs]

Hi,

I'm not an expert in this area, but as troll 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll), I want to add my 0.02.

Glynn is right - GRASS is not monolite app, that could be tweaked to work in 
paralell/threads. But individual modules could benefit from paralel 
processing. 

And here we come to political decision - how to paralelise it? It's realy 
important, because GRASS should use one paralelisation mehanism (we don't 
need one module that works with threads, second - Beowulfs and third works in 
SSI systems) and there are more than one option. Do we need GRASS to run on 
clusters? With modifications (like MPI for Beowulf) or by simply launching 
mupltiple processes (openMosx and other SSI). Or using threads (POSIX or GNU 
or ?) on slingle machine will be enough?

IMHO result of such discussion should be a note to GRASS programmers manual  
like: "When You develop new module to work in paralel, You should use FOO to 
make it work on/like BAR".

Maris.

PS. Some time a go there where efforts to make GRASS run on Beowulf clusters. 
Is this subproject dead?

On Thursday 02 November 2006 05:23, Glynn Clements wrote:
> Request Tracker wrote:
> > this bug's URL: http://intevation.de/rt/webrt?serial_num=5252
> >
> > This time next year dual quad - core desktop systems should be readily
> > available. What level of effort would it take for GRASS to be able to
> > split the processing load between the multiple cores?
>
> Most of GRASS' processing is in the individual modules, so you would
> have to re-write individual modules using multi-threaded algorithms.
>
> It doesn't help that the core GRASS libraries aren't remotely
> thread-safe, and can't readily be made so given the nature of the
> existing API.