Re: [NTG-context] distributed / parallel TeX?

On 12/16/2008 3:15 PM, luigi scarso wrote:

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Taco Hoekwater mailto:taco@elvenkind.com> wrote:

Hi Lars,

Lars Huttar wrote:

...

So the question comes up, can TeX runs take advantage of parallelized or distributed processing?

No. For the most part, this is because of another requisite: for applications to make good use of threads, they have to deal with a problem that can be parallelized well. And generally speaking, typesetting does not fall in this category. A seemingly small change on page 4 can easily affect each and every page right to the end of the document.

Also 3.11 Theory of page breaking www.cs.utk.edu/~eijkhout/594-LaTeX/handouts/TeX%20LaTeX%20 http://www.cs.utk.edu/~eijkhout/594-LaTeX/handouts/TeX%20LaTeX%20*course*.pdf

Certainly that is a tough problem (particularly in regard to laying out figures near the references to them). But again, if you can break down the document into chunks that are fairly independent of each other (and you almost always can for large texts), this problem seems no worse for distributed processing than for sequential processing. For example, the difficult part of laying out figures in Section 1 is confined to Section 1; it does not particularly interact with Section 2. References in Section 2 to Section 1 figures are going to be relatively distant from those figures regardless of page breaking decisions. Thus the difficult problem of page breaking is reduced to the sequential-processing case... still a hard problem, but one that can be attacked in chunks. Indeed, the greater amount of CPU time per page that is made available through distributed processing may mean that the algorithms can do a better job of page breaking than through sequential processing. Lars