rich@eddie.MIT.EDU (Richard Caloggero) (03/02/88)
A while ago (.. a long while ago ..) there was some stuff floating
around this newsgroup (comp.sys.apollo) about dsee. One of the articles talked about
dsee's ability to construct the object files in parallel by compiling
the various source files simultaniously on a number of nodes. It went
on to say that the program selected those nodes whose *load* was low in
order to maximize throughput.
Ok, all very well. How then is the *load* calculated. I have seen
various methods used, but all seem rather vague sort of things.
----- 1). The load is defined as the average number of
*runable* jobs in the
system over some interval of time. How might one calculate
this (on an Apollo and on a vanilla unix box)?
----- 2). One could calculate the ratio of the connect (clock
time) VS. the cpu time
used by some *_small_* compute-bound routine. I assume
this would always show something greater than 1 on a
multiprocessing system unless it was the only thing running
and it was never interupted (then the timing routines
wouldn't work if no clock interupts happen). This also
will take longer to run as the load goes up (doesn't seem
desirable).
-----
Does anyone care to comment on this stuff? Got any more ideas?
--
-- Rich (rich@eddie.mit.edu).
The circle is open, but unbroken.
Merry meet, merry part,
and merry meet again.