SMP questions

["Shreyas Kejariwal" <skejariwal@perigee.com>]

Hi everyone,

I am new to this arena and I have few questions so please help me answer
them.

1. Looks like most of the new systems employ SMPs. But do we still have
ASMPs systems ?

2. How can we control the tasks, threads to run on a particular processor ?
Is there a way we can specify ? Take the scenario where there are two
multi-threaded applications. I want all the threads of the App1 to run on
Processor, P1 and the threads of the App2 on Processor, P2. Not like some
threads of App1 would run on P2 depending on the scheduler.

3. How can processors access each other's memory / addr space?

4. Digging into the scheduler code, I found that we can either set scheduler
policy to be either Round Robin or FIFO. Are there other schedulers
available which use different policy.

5. I read about Shared and Non-shared Cache. How does L2 gets shared. Its on
the die. So does that mean that you have to buy a shared cache board ?

I apologize if some of the questions are stupid and outside the scope of
this forum.

Moreover, pointers to web-resources would be helpful.

Thanks,
Shreyas