HP 9000 N class

[Mohan Thomas]

Can I run a single application on multiple CPUs?

[Madanagopalan S]

Hi,
Can you brief me your requirement? you can run single application on
multiple CPUs. It will create processes and each process is assigned
to different CPU on load basis.

[paul courry]

Yes, seperate code and data spaces will be set up for each time you run the application. However, there is no way to assign a process to a particular CPU. A process is assigned to a CPU based on the load at that micro (pico?) second. Running a program multiple times should soak up progressivly larger and larger amounts of CPU, you just won't know which CPU it is running on that microsecond (but who cares, that is the beauty of multitasking).

[Dave Wherry]

Do you mean a single system with multiple CPUs, or mulitple systems?
As the other posts said, yes an apllication will run on a system with multiple CPU's. The operating system handles that and it works just fine.
With load balancing software applications can run on multiple systems. I've never used any, but, it is out there.
And, actually you can assign an application to run on a specific CPU. You need to use the mpctl() system call in the code of the application. I've never done it on an HP. Have done it on Sequent systems and it too works just fine.

[Bill Hassell]

If the goal is to utilize more CPU's to speed processing, then a rewrite of the software is necessary. Threads is one technique which requires that parallel portions of the program be separated into separate routines which are synchronized.

For database server programs, this is quite common. But for compute intensive numerical analysis programs, processing usually progresses serially so threads are tricky to implement. There are specialized compilers that can analyze the code and separate various tasks like matrix solvers into separate threads.