Tigran and I havestarted to look at what other people are doing and we hope YOU will inform us of systems from which we can learn. ( campbell@desy.de ).

Here are some projects I think we can learn from ( or make use of ).
Most are research projects and/or work in progress.

How should we implement the new harness for PC-Linux ?

Data transfer software API( application programmers interface ):

PVM ( parallel virtual machine )

MPI ( Message Passing Interface ) may be better than PVM in performance and
longer-term support . Various implementation are available for Linux which
provide also some of the features missing in MPI cf PVM.

Nexus library ( part of Globus computing grid project )

VIA ( virtual interface architecture ) specifically M-VIA for Linux and upcoming
MPI for M-VIA . Provides lower latency than TCP even for fast ethernet and
for faster networks much higher bandwidth. May be best approach for our
system

Sockets

Shared memory : current harness uses shared memory for inter-machine communication
...should we use this approach on Linux or move to eg PVM with UNIX domain sockets
or M-VIA