[GRASSLIST:5900] Re: Working with grass in clusteres enviroments.

[Glynn Clements]

Antonio G. - Geotronix wrote:

> I was wondering if, when and how Grass will ever support clustering.
> Now days, setting  up a openMosix cluster is cheap and easy, giving on
> the other hand pure computing power. As far as I can understand, the
> fact that Grass is a collection of unix programs that can run
> indipendently on the same machine makes Grass the optimum playground for
> testing mosix clusters.
> Do you know of any Grass-openmosix experiments on the net?
> BTW. I had pointed out in previous months that some Grass apps would
> benefit enourmously from being parallized. I think of r.mapcalc,
> r.surf.contour, etc.
> Are there plans of parallelizing such apps?

No.

Or, to put it another way, if anyone is planning on adding parallelism
to GRASS modules, they are likely to be disappointed. The core GRASS
libraries aren't remotely threadsafe, so any parallelism would have to
be restricted to pure memory-to-memory operations; making multiple
concurrent calls to GRASS library functions won't work, and can't be
made to work without a fundamental re-write (i.e. discarding GRASS and
re-implementing equivalent functionality from scratch).

For the foreseeable future, the only feasible way to exploit
parallelism would be to run multiple sessions.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>