30 Jan
2008
30 Jan
'08
8:59 a.m.
Eric J Korpela wrote:
The easiest is a ring with packet forwardings. Each
machine has its
output connected to one machine and its input connected to another.
This is probably the simplest hardware wise and software wise. It's
also the slowest. When a packet comes in, its destination address is
checked against the current machines address. If it doesn't match, it
is forwarded to the next machine. No collision detection is
necessary. One potential problem is that a packet with a bad address
can circulate forever unless you have a way of detecting it.
This is pretty much the only feasible solution IMO.
You have to ask yourself, "What is a cluster of C64 machines going to
do?" If it's a cluster, probably something like heavy lifting
(raytracing, calculating something, etc.). So latency isn't really an
issue because you don't need speed, just communication/synchronization
between machines.
What *is* this cluster going to do, anyway?
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
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