-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday 08 January 2002 00:06, Farid Hajji wrote: > > Of course, one can always simulate multicasting or avoid it completely. > That is not a big issue. >
Being a parallel programming person: the whole point of multicast is low level support in network so that collective communications attain favorable speedups. IOW, it is similar to a multi-port communication model whereas such a simulation that you mention would make your collective communications single-port. Note that very few distributed systems make use of IP multicast. There is a good reason for this: multicasting is not yet reliable. However, it is said that multicast works reasonably well in IPv6. I haven't tested that myself. Another reason why multicasting is not exploited too much may be the following: the kind of multicasting the IP people talk about is things like streaming video broadcast over long distances whereas parallel/distributed people would like something that would give them a very efficient way to do a broadcast/scatter/gather/reduce etc. Thanks, - -- Eray Ozkural (exa) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8PO8mfAeuFodNU5wRAkcvAJwLir4A7xMbUvGrcsW6RqouJVCmggCgilZi pYFM+mUV6eebvOSR3mnMnEQ= =wLTq -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
