| Customize Help

Distributed MIL on your local computer


Typically, Distributed MIL is used among one local computer and one or more remote computers. This could be to improve the performance of processing heavy applications or to allow a local computer to use or monitor a remote computer (for example, on the factory floor or in another country). However, you can use Distributed MIL to create a cluster consisting only of your local computer (for example, to test a Distributed MIL setup that will eventually be run over several computers). You can create this Distributed MIL cluster on your local computer whether in controlling or monitoring configuration, although the procedure is slightly different.

Developing and debugging a Distributed MIL application

When developing or debugging an application that will use a Distributed MIL cluster, it can be more efficient to set up a cluster on your local computer. For instance, when testing, you don't have to worry about connection issues, such as internet problems and network failures. You can focus solely on the logic of the application(s). Also, when transferring files from your local computer to the remote computer's folder structure during testing, it is faster, especially with large folders of test images. Finally, by setting up your Distributed MIL cluster on your local computer, you are able to develop the entire cluster before you have access to the actual remote computers. When testing a Distributed MIL cluster on your local computer, however, measuring load times and overall processing speed is useless.

Using a 32-bit MIL application to access Matrox hardware under a 64-bit operating system

When running a 32-bit version of MIL under a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows, you will not be able to access any Matrox hardware without Distributed MIL. The drivers for any Matrox hardware installed under a 64-bit operating system will be 64-bit, and will not be directly accessible by a 32-bit application, such as Matrox Inspector. To use any Matrox hardware through a 32-bit application, allocate a DMIL remote system (in the controlling configuration), and specify localhost as the remote computer name.

Note that when you have a 64-bit version of MIL and you need your 64-bit application to access a 32-bit application, or even call a function from a 32-bit legacy library, you cannot use Distributed MIL directly. Contact your Matrox representative for further information.

Steps to use Distributed MIL on your local computer

The steps to run a Distributed MIL setup on your local computer are slightly different depending on the configuration:

  • To run a controlling application that allocates a DMIL remote system on your local computer, you must:

    1. Ensure that your local computer is running the Distributed MIL server. For more information on running a Distributed MIL server on your local computer, see the Setting up the Distributed MIL server on remote computers subsection of the Preparing computers for Distributed MIL section earlier in this chapter. Note that the section is about running the Distributed MIL server on a remote computer, but the procedures are the same for running a Distributed MIL server on your local computer.

    2. Allocate a DMIL remote system on your local computer, using MsysAlloc() with SystemDescriptor set to MIL_TEXT("dmilshm://[Passkey:]localhost[:Port]/MILSystemType"), where [Passkey] is replaced with the passkey specified in the server settings page of the MILConfig utility on the local computer, and MILSystemType is replaced with the type of MIL system (often a Matrox board) that you need to allocate.

  • To run both a publishing application and a monitoring application on your local computer, you must:

    1. Publish MIL objects from one or more MIL applications running on your computer. These are now the publishing applications.

    2. Connect a monitoring application to the publishing application(s), using MappOpenConnection() with ConnectionDescriptor set to MIL_TEXT("dmilshm://[Passkey:]localhost[:Port]"), where [Passkey] is replaced with the passkey specified in the server settings page of the MILConfig utility of the local computer.

    • The previous steps outlined running a DMIL setup on your local computer using the DMIL SHM protocol. You can also use the TCP/IP protocol when using DMIL on your local computer, but the SHM protocol will provide faster performance. If you use the TCP/IP protocol, replace "dmilshm" with "dmiltcp" and either leave "localhost" as is or replace it with 127.0.0.1.

    For more information concerning setting the Passkey, please refer to the Managing network connections and ports subsection of the Preparing computers for Distributed MIL section earlier in this chapter.