>>>>> "jpm" == James P Massar <······@alum.mit.edu> writes:
jpm> Anyone have any experience / knowledge wrt using Common Lisp
jpm> on parallel machine configurations like Beowulf clusters?
I have read about, but never used, ParGCL (a GCL binding to MPI) and
CL-PVM.
<URL:http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/gene/pargcl.html>
<URL:http://wotug.kent.ac.uk/parallel/environments/pvm3/clpvm/>
--
Eric Marsden <URL:http://www.laas.fr/~emarsden/>
James P. Massar <······@alum.mit.edu> writes:
> Anyone have any experience / knowledge wrt using Common Lisp
> on parallel machine configurations like Beowulf clusters?
When I tried this, the only real-ish difficulties I found were, how to
transmit data in binary, and what to do if one of the instances landed
in the debugger. None of these difficulties seemed too hard to me.
I once did a test run on 7 machines. I had 7 different consoles where
each process was running, and thankfully no major debugging need did
arise. Speed seemed acceptable, as usual.
At the end I found a better algorithm that ran in seconds on one box,
so I did not have to parallelize anymore. But from my limited
experience with MPI, I think that using CL + low-level socket magic
quickly becomes competitive, if only because of it being more
convenient.