🚀 go-pugleaf

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Clarifications about the status of the iPSC  message-passing  li-
brary on the DASH/SGI machines.
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(1)  We have successfully integrated FORTNET to the iPSC library,
but that part is NOT ready to be shipped yet.  An early announce-
ment was made as part of good research etiquette  so  that  other
researchers  can  plan  ahead.  The matter is in the hands of the
British researchers; the Stanford team is only supporting the in-
terface.   However,  Dr.  Robert  Allan at the SERC Daresbury Lab
(rja@cxa.dl.ac.uk) will still be glad to hear  from  you  if  you
just  want to send in an early registration of your interest.  My
apologies for the confusions in the earlier posting!

(2)  Just to follow Ms. Manner's research guidelines, perhaps  we
should  give some indications on the direction that we are taking
for the next major release.  We are planning to upgrade  the  li-
brary  to  socket-based  I/O, so that it will eventually run on a
network of 340VGX or 380VGX and simultaneously upgrade  the  per-
formance  on  DASH.   The entire idea is to compare the hardware-
driven performance on DASH to the software-driven performance  on
a  cluster of 340VGX under the same protocol.  The spin-off bene-
fit to the CS community is a socket-based iPSC library  that,  in
theory,  should  run  on  any  cluster  of  SGI's.   Since  there
shouldn't be too much architecture-dependent code in the library,
one  can  reasonably  expect  to  port the code to other types of
workstation clusters, although our group will not have  the  man-
power  to  support other architectures.  Anyone who is interested
in supporting other architectures should feel  free  to  send  me
mail  so that I can send you early versions of our "scratch" code
(and put everything under the same release).

(3)  We also welcome users to make "do-able" suggestions for  the
library, such as that of expanding the library to OSF/860.