"vi" & Supercomputer Performance

[Carl Edman]

In article <8144 at scolex.sco.COM> seanf at sco.COM (Sean Fagan) writes:
   In article <boylanr.655424875 at silver> boylanr at silver.ucs.indiana.edu (ross boylan) writes:
   >I recall that some documentation from NCSA (Crays under UNICOS) said
   >that it was OK to run emacs; it didn't degrade system performance.

   Ah, yes, Crays:  machines where a 1-2Mb EMACS process is considered small.

   It isn't that the emacs didn't degrade performance, it was that it was found
   that using emacs (or other editors, for that matter) locally on the cray was
   more efficient in *programmer time* than ftp'ing the file from the cray,
   editing locally on your workstation, and ftp'ing it back.  And, yes,
   programmer time is still very expensive.

It still seems like a terrible squandering of resources to use valueable
cray preformance to do such a simple job with low (by cray standards)
preformance requirements as editing files and at the same time use
your local workstation as dumb terminal.

The solution ? Use "ange-ftp" , a free emacs lisp file. It allows you
to read and write files on any filesystem reachable via ftp completely
transparently. f.e. if I want to edit a file "/tmp/foo" on the cray
"y1.sdsc.edu" and use emacs here to do it I simply open a file
(by the standard method) and give "/y1.sdsc.edu:/tmp/foo" as a file name.
Reading, writing, dir-edit-ing, and even file name completion works just
as if the entire cray filesystem was local.

Isn't emacs great ? (No, please no editor flamewar. vi, is great,too)

	Carl Edman



Theorectial Physicist,N.:A physicist whose   | Send mail
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