Re: Ada using the Internet for multi-tasking

[rharwood@east.pima.edu]

In article <366@platypus.uofs.edu>, cml8@robin.cs.uofs.edu (Chris M. Little) 
writes:
> I was discussing with a friend the possibility of a single Ada program spawning
> its tasks over many hosts on the Internet or any other network or subnet.  We
> have about 30 Sun 4 Workstations in our department.  I have an account on all
> of them.  If I had a huge Ada program which utilized multi-tasking, I would
> like for the workload to be shared by all of them, and not just one.  Has
> anyone else entertained this concept and/or does anyone know of an Ada package
> that might support this?  Any insight on the issue would be welcome.

First, your system manager should violently object to such a possibility, if it
existed! <grin>

But I am not aware of any current Ada compiler that allows for a single program
to be written which "multi-tasks/multi-processes" over multiple processors.  I
worked on a radar warning receiver which utilized 3 80186s running somewhat
similar functions... but we had to take the approach of building a messaging
system interface between the processors (we actually used FIFOs-on-a-chip) with
special message structures for communicating "work tasks" and other info.  As a
Mac/VAX user, I'm not familiar with the UNIX interprocess communication
capability other than to say I know it exists... hopefully your compiler vendor
has provided a package with the interface calls "pre-coded".

Ray Harwood            |PO Box 18324        |Internet: rharwood@east.pima.edu
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