fouts@lemming.nas.nasa.gov.nas.nasa.gov (Marty Fouts) (08/30/88)
In article <20463@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes: >In article <523@nikhefh.hep.nl> i91@nikhefh.hep.nl (Fons Rademakers) writes: >>Could somebody tell me if it possible at all to port GNU Emacs to a >>Cray runnig Unicos 4.0? If so, did somebody already to this? If not, >>why not? > >It's been done with an older version of Unicos. But do you really >want to do your work that way? > >The Cray vector architecture has fairly poor handling of character I/O >and interrupts/context switches, at least in the conventional UNIX >sense. I suspect you'd get better performance (and bother the heavy >crunchers on the Cray less) if you used ftp-find-file to keep the >editing on your friendly local workstation or front-end host. Do the >compiling and debugging and big problem solving on the Cray, and keep >the user interaction on a machine better suited to it. > WE use GNU on our Cray 2, and find that ftp-find-file would require much more overhead on the 2 then using GNU does. I've seen this its-faster-not-to-do-characters-on-a-supercomputer reflex a lot of times, but when I've measured it, it doesn't work out to be true. ftp, especially of a long (>60K line) program for a small number of changes is much more expensive than making the same changes in a window. It is true that interaction should happen on the front end and computing on the back, but ftp-find-file isn't as effective as keeping a shell window open, editing and doing recompiles locally. Better yet might be supdup with GNU split between the front and back end, ala Pike's editor on the BLIT, but I haven't measured that, so I am only speculating. +-+-+-+ I don't know who I am, why should you? +-+-+-+ | fouts@lemming.nas.nasa.gov | | ...!ames!orville!fouts | | Never attribute to malice what can be | +-+-+-+ explained by incompetence. +-+-+-+