Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: montoya@ciril.fr (Frederic Montoya)
Subject: Re: DCE and PVM, differences please
Organization: CIRIL - NANCY - FRANCE
Date: 2 Sep 1994 08:16:58 GMT
Message-ID: <346n1q$e5e@arcturus.ciril.fr>

Hi,

I've been using both environments for a while now. I am mainly programming
numerical intensive applications (stochastic optimisation). First of all
I have to say that DCE and PVM are basically targetted for different
purposes. DCE is a RPC environment devoted to distributed computing and
I think mainly for client/server architectures. PVM is a message passing
environment devoted to direct parallelization. My own use of DCE in a
parallel programming paradigm is to mix the RPC library and the
multi-threading feature to implement something like "active messages".
In this case I've found DCE really efficient and I particularly appreciate
the error recovery mecanisms. But I must say that programming with DCE
is really far more complex than with PVM. It involves many client/server
concepts and you have to use many services and write quite a lot of code
before just getting something working. The main advantages of PVM over DCE
are: 1) easy to understand 2) wide spread in the parallel computing community
3) fully asynchronous without any trick (multi-threading) 4) no client/server
architecture enforced.
Any other experience ?

Frederic.



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Frederic Montoya

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