ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (09/30/89)
PMK: In mail to isis-bugs, we were recently asked if we plan to fix the parallel make demo, which is not working under either ISIS V1.2 or V1.3. This demo has some sort of trivial problem that arose when we stopped passing address structures by value and began passing references. It should be easy to fix, but other things have been higher on our priority list. I've asked one of my students to look at fixing the demo and also integrating it with META to pick the best machines on which to run in a more intelligent manner. We expect to include this souped up version of pmk with the V2.0 distribution, which is planned for late this fall. Getting started: If you are trying to get a feel for what ISIS is like from our demos, pmk might not be the best choice. I usually suggest that people play with "twenty questions" and "grid", in the run_demos directory, to get some experience with ISIS. A better exercise is to extend "qa" to support an update command and extend "twenty" to accept updates to its little database. This isn't hard, yet you need to understand a little about ISIS to do it. [Question: which broadcast should be used to send the updates?] Would people like us to post some problems of this sort, and perhaps post solutions after a few weeks?