[GRASSLIST:1704] Re: GRASS on clusters

[Lars Bromley]

Looks like I may have missed an important detail out there: GRASS would need to
be recompiled in parallelized form, and this requires an expensive compiler or
some heavy programming? Darn details and their devils...

I was hoping that Beowulf would analyze the processes and distribute the
computing tasks, am I misunderstanding how such software works?

Thanks for your time,
Lars

Markus Neteler wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 07:01:50PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
> > On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Lars Bromley wrote:
> >
> > > I'd like to reopen Dr. Rich Shepard's year old message (see below) to this
> > > list, regarding using GRASS with a cluster.  I have a big project coming
> > > up and am hoping to set up a cluster to help speed up the workload. Have
> > > any of you experimented further with GRASS and clusters? Messages to the
> > > listserv indicate that it is indeed possible, but I didn't see if anyone
> > > had actually tried it. If anyone has, would they mind giving me a clue as
> > > to how it might turn out? Does it speed things up, or is it more hassle
> > > than its worth? I am using linux as my OS and will be using Beowulf as my
> > > clustering software, and have six pentiums to start with.
> >
> > Lars,
> >
> >   Some day, I'd like to be able to afford the port. The parallelizing
> > compiler is very expensive (at least on my budget), but it is do-able. Right
> > now, I have higher priorities on my GRASS time, and I've not read anything
> > from anyone else about putting together such a port.
> >
> >   There would be a large time investment, too, to reorganize the code so it
> > could be parallelized. Candidly, I've no clue what that would require.
> >
> > Rich
> >
>
> excuse me to indrude here... Just a hint:
> GRASS 5 contains the "gmath" library which is a wrapper to LAPACK/BLAS.
> LAPACK/BLAS itself is a sophisticated mathematical library which exists
> in parallelized form (as far as I know). See:
> http://www.netlib.org/lapack/
>
> Like that cpu-intensive parts in GRASS code could be rewritten to utilize
> the "gmath" lib (src/libes/gmath/).
>
> Maybe that's a starting point?
>
> Regards
>
>  Markus Neteler
>
> PS: Some "gmath" details can be found in the "GRASS 5 programmer's manual":
>     http://www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/grassdevel.html#prog