Hi there,
I don't know if this is anything that has ever been discussed or
considered, but would be interested in any thoughts.
I frequently find myself these days writing shell scripts, to run on
multi-core machines, which could easily exploit lots of parallelism (eg. a
batch of a hundred independent simulations).
The basic parallelism construct of '&' for async execution is highly
expressive, but it's not useful for this sort of use-case: starting up 100
jobs at once will leave them competing, and lead to excessive context
switching and paging.
So for practical purposes, I find myself reaching for 'make -j<n>' or GNU
parallel, both of which destroy the expressiveness of the shell script as I
have to redirect commands and parameters to Makefiles or stdout, and
wrestle with appropriate levels of quoting.
What I would really *like* would be an extension to the shell which
implements the same sort of parallelism-limiting / 'process pooling' found
in make or 'parallel' via an operator in the shell language, similar to '&'
which has semantics of *possibly* continuing asynchronously (like '&') if
system resources allow, or waiting for the process to complete (';').
Any thoughts, anyone?
Thanks!
--
C.
https://plus.google.com/109211294311109803299
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