[PD] pd with SMP?

[CK]

I read:
> I'm helping develop an installation using pd (linux).  We are quite poor,
> but still manage to have the choice between using a single celeron 533 MHz
> processor, or a SMP system with two celerons running at 523 MHz.

I dunno how well pd behaves on a smp system but in general since you will
run other processes aswell I'd go for the smp system and depending on the
project lots of ram + fast disks
 
> There are four cheap sound cards in this system to give us eight outputs.  
> I think these must all take their input from one pd, as we need to

this is a faq, actually discussed to death on the linux audio developer
list - the bottom line is it won't work if the cards are not hardware
synced (a possibility that cheap cards rarely offer) mail me privately
if you want the details why.

> smoothly move between them.

you could OTOH hand run 4 pd's with the 4 different cards and redundant 
data (tmpfs ramdisk comes to mind) and use netsend/receive to control
them all from one interface
 
> Is there a good way to take advantage of both processors in the SMP
> configuration (and would this provide a significant performance gain over
> a single processor)?  

I'm not experienced enough with smp to answer that 

> Is Open Sound Control (OSC) the only way to do this (run a pd on each
> processor, with a mixing stage in one of them, and OSC providing the
> pipe)?  Does anyone know if the overhead associated with OSC would make
> this a bad idea?  Anything better?  Any simple solutions?

apart from the ramdisk approach you could use
pipe/fifo
OSC
netsend/receive
midi loopback
or a combination of the above depending again on what you try to accomplish.

regards,

x 

-- 
chris at lo-res.org	Postmodernism is german romanticism with better
http://pilot.fm/	special effects. (Jeff Keuss / via ctheory.com)