[CMake] Do any CMake back ends have support for parallel builds that efficiently use clusters?

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2018-01-12 13:34+0300 Konstantin Tokarev wrote:

>
>
> 12.01.2018, 12:58, "Alan W. Irwin" <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>:
>> I am looking into the practicality of using clusters containing ~5
>> cheap ARM 8-core computers (such as the Banana Pi M3) to rapidly build
>> and test software (since even with ccache I am currently spending a
>> lot of my time waiting for tests to complete as I develop my
>> software). Such clusters would give you ~40 cores which is a lot of
>> computer power for ~$500 or so. But, of course, the issue with
>> clusters is how to use them efficiently?
>
> 1. For compilation you often need good single-core performance more
> than parallelism, and I doubt that embedded-grade ARMv8 can provide it
>
> I guess exception is compiling projects written in C which don't have huge
> source files. Still, overhead of passing data between nodes may be
> substanital.
>
> 2. You should probably use icecc or distcc, unless you have MPI as a
> requirement.

Most of the work is run-time tests (configured with
add_custom_command/target) rather than compilations.  It have just
discovered that it looks like "distmake" or equivalent is what I need
(see the post I just wrote).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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