Make in parallel (was 'Swap file in scyld')

[Jarrod Smith]

Sean Dilda wrote:
> The tricky part is getting make (or something like it) to use a cluster
> for compiling.  I have heard of companies that use clusters for
> compiling like that, but unfortunately I know of no publiclly available
> verion of make (or something similar) that can be setup to use a cluster
> for compiling.   If anyone knows of one, I'd love to hear about it.
> 
> Jag

If you were in the regime where your compile bottleneck were the CPU time
(and not I/O or object order-dependence) then a simple thread-based load
balancing scheme like MOSIX and "make -jN" (where N is the number of
processors in your cluster) might stand a reasonable chance of speeding
things up...  This is just in theory.  I have not tried this except on a
2-way SMP box, where it does indeed seem to speed things up.

-- 
Jarrod A. Smith
Research Asst. Professor, Biochemistry
Asst. Director, Center for Structural Biology
Computation and Molecular Graphics
Vanderbilt University

jsmith at structbio.vanderbilt.edu