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Linux Parallel Processing HOWTO

Hank Dietz, [email protected]

v2.0, 2004-06-28

Although this HOWTO has been "republished" (v2.0, 2004-06-28) to update the author contact info, it has many broken links and some information is seriously out of date. Rather than just repairing links, this document is being heavily rewritten as a Guide which we expect to release in July 2004. At that time, the HOWTO will be obsolete. The prefered home URL for both the old and new documents is http://aggregate.org/LDP/


Parallel Processing refers to the concept of speeding-up the execution of a program by dividing the program into multiple fragments that can execute simultaneously, each on its own processor. A program being executed across N processors might execute N times faster than it would using a single processor. This document discusses the four basic approaches to parallel processing that are available to Linux users: SMP Linux systems, clusters of networked Linux systems, parallel execution using multimedia instructions (i.e., MMX), and attached (parallel) processors hosted by a Linux system.

1. Introduction

2. SMP Linux

3. Clusters Of Linux Systems

4. SIMD Within A Register (e.g., using MMX)

5. Linux-Hosted Attached Processors

6. Of General Interest


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