[no subject]

[Steve Willis <bruno%oz.geology.washington.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>]

slug users-

  We have developed an image processing system on the Symbolics that while
quite useful, is slower than toast.  Pressure from users has caused us to
look for ways to speed it up.  Since we have a Sun 4 with a Taac (The
Application ACcellerator) board in it, we have thought about using the Taac
to accelerate our applications while using the Symbolics as a front end, etc, etc.
So, we have developed some C pgms to perform the common image processng functons, 
and now wish have the Symbolics invoke these functions on the Sun - typically
click on the sym, process on the Sun, view , interact and cogitate on the Sym, etc.
  So how do we get the Sym and the Sun to interact??  There are a couple of
possibilities as we see it, but we are naive, and would appreciate more suggestions.

 1)  Use some sort of RPC call.  Any ideas on how to do this would be helpful.
 2)  Use some sort of daemon on the Sun with the daemon checking for the presence of
     some file with the program to run and data descriptors.  These seems similar
     to the way the present line printer spooler works.
 3)  use standard unix spooler technology somehow.

  We are not unix gurus, and except for the possbility of dramaticaaly speeding up
our image processing application, we wouldn't fool with unix.  Has anyone done stuff
similar to this, is there some documentation that would help?

  Additionally, we are interested in a general distributed computing model
that would allow us to easily interface our imaging system with whatever
super duper number cruncher comes along.  Any thoughts??

thanks,
steve willis, et al
remote sensing
university of washington
bruno@oz.geology.washington.edu