Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: dfields@lehman.com (Doug Fields)
Subject: Re: PVM on Windows PCs?
Organization: Lehman Brothers, Parallel Processing Group
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 1994 15:11:06 GMT
Message-ID: <CvprIJ.KpD@lehman.com>

>Anyhow, why exactly must windows be running on the hardware?  I appreciate
>the investment that you have in the hardware.  Why not run a small linux
>kernel on these hoards of intel boxes, run PVM, and be done with this
>thread?

This has been suggested many, many times, and were the PCs needed for their
actual processing power they could add to a PVM network, this would indeed
be a solution. Rather than that, though, PVM is used as a message-passing
interface between a wide variety of applications rather than for (or, I should
say, in addition to) parallel computing, per se. 

I.e. PVM is being used in a minimal way to implement network communications
which have to be portable across multiple platforms.

A number of these applications are servers of a variety of information.
The Windows users want to be able to access this information and put it
into their spreadsheets, forcasting programs, or whatever. 

There are a number of non-PVM solutions (which looks like the way it will
end up being done), but a minimal port of PVM seemed quite easy and would
allow a large amount of code reuse.

On the issue of running Linux on the machines, it is simply not practical.
While most of us on this newsgroup know everything there is to know about
computers, the average Windows user does not, and would have absolutely
no clue what was expected of him or what this "enhancement" would do.

Cheers,

Doug
--
Doug Fields, dfields@lehman.com
Lehman Brothers Inc., Parallel Processing Group
212-526-1237

