5. Future Work

The initial version of pgmake serves as a proof-of-concept implementation. We are actively exploring the following areas to improve the performance and robustness of the system.

• Distribution and load-balancing. PVM uses a simple round-robin load-balancing scheme when scheduling tasks. It would be desirable to make more intelligent choices concerning load-balancing, taking into account the actual load on the PVM nodes.

• Improved node metrics. PVM maintains a relative processor speed number for each node, but does not seem to set it to an interesting value, nor use it for any reason. It would be useful to use this number to indicate the relative speeds of certain machines. A metric is needed to be able to distinguish between multi-processor machines from uni-processor ones.

• Investigate see-saw behavior in performance. We would like obtain more data samples to confirm our theories on how increasing job sizes compare to the number of processors. We would also like to investigate the seemingly ``random'' behavior for make -j 1 when the PVM size changes.

• Real-time Handling of stdout and stderr. In the current implementation, stdout and stderr are buffered up into files and only sent back to the initiating process when the spawned task has completed. We would like to implement pvm3_ad to connects to its child process via two pipes, and send bursts of stdout and stderr messages back to the parent.

• Cross Compilation. The GNU development suite of compiler, assembler and linker provide a way to cross-compile binaries across dissimilar architectures. Combining pgmake with cross-compilation can provide significant performance boosts in generating binaries for architectures that are either slower in computational speed or smaller in number.