Hi all,



I've got a question concerning parallelization of visualization inspired by

parallel version of Heatbugs (which works very nicely on a Core Duo by the

way, one can really see the difference) and Mr. Ong's problem.



My understanding is that, as the GUI thread repaints displays, the SimState

thread is put on hold. When we consider really computationally expensive GUI

tasks as laying out a graphs, this seems to be suboptimal solution. I was

wondering if it would be possible to put the two thread on separate

processors, have the GUI thread probe the other one for information and

afterwards to detach and free the SimState thread to go ahead while GUI is

doing its job. After GUI is done, the process would repeat.



I realize that in general I would loose synchronization, but if I'm laying

something out let's say each 50 time-steps and still have to wait few second

for the simulation to resume, this path would provide me with much smoother

and faster performance. 



The questions are:



1) Is it doable?

2) Would it violate some important MASON design principle?

3) How much modification to MASON core would one have to introduce to arrive

at such a solution?



Regards



Maciek Latek