[ILUG] Re: Number crunching

[kevin lyda]

On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 10:07:35AM +0000, Declan Moriarty wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 02:05:53PM +0000, Nick Murtagh wrote:
> > > On Friday 15 March 2002 13:15, Ferren MacIntyre wrote:
> > > > Given the difficulty of using dual processors efficiently, is there a
> > > > low-overhead way of dedcating one to background number crunching, while
> > > > the foreground one does the lesser tasks of word- and image-processing?
> > > >  I've never had any problem keeping 2 computers gainfully employed in
> > > > that mode.
> > > There's a CPU affinity patch floating around that lets you nail specific
> > > processes to a CPU... in theory though a good scheduler should take care
> > > of that sort of thing automatically.

i think the affinity patch is what ferren wants.

> The answer to at least some of these problems was dreamt up for a different 
> time (The time of 20Mhz z80s). Sinclair (of ZX81, & Spectrum fame) , 
> envisioned and tried to develop with some British University a system which 
> had a very fast internal core with its own code, multitasking to  several 

actually, as ferren uses macs, i think he'd think back to radius rocket
cards.  you used to be able to drop those cards (which had a 68040 on it)
in a mac and then apps like photoshop could access that additional cpu
power for image processing.

kevin

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