|
HP OpenVMS Systemsask the wizard |
|
The Question is: Can Cobol application take advantage of SMP? Cobol application runs on an ES40. There are 4 CPUs in SMP configuration. The application uses 1 CPU only. What do I need to do or is it possible for the application to make use of the other 3 processors? Thank you The Answer is : Per Amdahl's law, the benefit of adding additional processors into an SMP system is directly proportional to the amount of code that can be run in parallel. The COBOL compiler does not itself parallelize application code. COBOL applications and applications in other languages can certainly be coded to operate across multiple processors, and you are probably already utilizing multiple processors simply by having several application processes running in parallel. OpenVMS SMP and the OpenVMS process scheduling mechanisms provide this by default, and the typical timesharing workloads do tend to parallelize nicely. As for explicitly using DECthreads or the OpenVMS kernel threads support from a COBOL application to code the application to operate in parallel at a threading level, this is quite possible but is not as easy to code as it might be from C or another language. As for using shared memory or message-passing or files as part of parallel processing using multiple processes, this is all obviously also entirely and easily possible -- and this is one of the more common programming techniques for performing parallel operations. Please take the time to review the Programming Concepts manual and related documentation, and please review topics here in the Ask The Wizard area starting with topic (1661). As for the mixed-language capabilities of OpenVMS, please see the calling standard manual in the OpenVMS documentation set.
|