Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: roberto@ee.uwa.edu.au (Roberto Togneri)
Subject: Re: Could X applications run under pvm sys. ?
Organization: The University of Western Australia
Date: 5 Aug 1994 05:37:49 GMT
Message-ID: <31sj7d$5jh@styx.uwa.edu.au>

In <31m79k$1kh@osceola.cs.ucf.edu> frolich@corrine.cpc.cs.ucf.edu (Ethan Frolich ) writes:

>	Since every PVM process essentially behaves as a normal UNIX process,
>(almost?) anything you can do in a normal process, you can do in a PVM
>process. I recently took a parallel programming course here where we had
>to write a wave simulation using PVM. I chose to incorporate an X Windows
>interface into the application to show each iteration of the alogrithm.
>The animation works fine. The only inconvenience of programming such an
>application as the one above is that all of the display data must be
>present on the host that is actually generating the display, meaning
>possible large amounts of network communication.

>Ethan Frolich
>(frolich@cs.ucf.edu)

Yes I did the same thing last year. To minimise the communication
bottleneck I had the slave tasks perform all the world --> screen
co-ordinate mappings and just pass the required structures and parameter
data for the XDrawLines() to the master program managing the display. This
not only reduced the communication (since I am passing integer plot data not
real/float calculated data) but reduced computations since the slaves
performed the world-->screen mappings in parallel.

--
Dr. Roberto Togneri                        Phone: +61-9-380-2535     _--_|\
Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems               /      \ 
Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering                        *_.--._/
The University of Western Australia        Fax:   +61-9-380-1101          v 
NEDLANDS WA 6009 Australia                 Email: roberto@ee.uwa.edu.au

