Parallel Programming

IRIX is designed to take advantage of multiple processors and provides interfaces to support parallel programming. These interfaces include:

Low-overhead inter-process communication routines--The IRIX IPC mechanisms use a shared arena (shared memory) for communication between processes. This arena is mapped into a process's user space, which means most of the shared arena IPC functions don't have to make system calls. This keeps overhead lower than for standard System V IPC. Read the chapter titled "Inter-Process Communication" in Topics in IRIX Programming for more information about shared arenas.
Multiprocessor control routines--IRIX supports the sysmp(2) commands MP_RESTRICT and MP_MUSTRUN, and the runon(1) and mpadmin(1) commands. These allow you to control the distribution of processes among the processors in a multiprocessor system. Read the REACT/Pro Release Notes for more information about these commands.
Shared address space (sproc)--This system call creates a new process that is a clone of the calling process and that shares the virtual address space of the calling process.