Looking for efficient way to communicate between application on parallel system
 

I am hoping someone has more experience at this than I do. I need an efficient (since it will occur quite frequently) way for mutliple applications (not threads) to communicate with each other while running C++ on multiple machine, parallel system (openmosix, fedora 3 -- if that would affect things).

Any thoughts? Perferably from someone that has done it before, but willing to listen to any ideas.

Thanks,

Tony

My first thought i this wold be to use sockets and send data through an ethernet port. Since sockets are usually common across system you might be able to make a nice class that can be used on the different systems.

You could use sockets, MQseries, gSOAP, CORBA, RPC, SWIFT, mySQL, NFS file transfers, emails, ssh, ftp, xfb and many other kind of tools but is depends on the context.
Which kind of performance do you need/expect?
How much data need to travel, at which rate and to how many machines?
Are the machines running different OSes?
How important is the monitoring of your application's communication?
How far away are your machines (is that the internet or local lan)?
What is the speed of the network?
How many machines are there?
How important is the security/confidentiality of the data that travels accross?
How important is the reliability of the data?
Is the sequence of the data important?
How must your applications synchronize?
Do you need a batch or real time data transfer?
Is the architecture of your application client/server style or peer to peer?
Is it ok to rely on closed souce middleware to transport your data?
Are you ready to pay for a middleware, if yes how much?
It also depends on the nature of the data and the architecture of your application, and if your application need to communicate with other third party applications or not.

It will start with 2 computers on a LAN. However, it needs to be able to scale up. All computers will be running the same OS, fedora core 3 with openmosix.

The application communication needs to be real time, so file transfers or communicating through a db seems out.

Middleware purchase is not possible. Needs to be open share/freeware.

Is there a way to do a shared memory access over the multiple computers?

Thanks,

Tony