Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: zrcc0100@nfhsg2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de (Manuela Sang)
Subject: Re: Does PVM do Load Balancing?
Organization: Comp.Center (RUS), U of Stuttgart, FRG
Date: 27 Oct 1994 11:05:13 GMT
Message-ID: <38o1h9$hoa@info2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de>

Hi Peter,

In article <38lr4o$qbf@quartz.ucs.ualberta.ca>, pbuttuls@seymour.ucs.ualberta.ca
(Peter Imants Buttuls) writes:
 
> Sorry for my mistake in a previous item. I meant to ask if PVM does 
> automatic load balancing, and if so, under what conditions. Thanks.

PVM is not a tool for automatic or semi-automatic parallelisation, but a
message passing system. It offers you functions for message passing (send,
receive, synchronise, ...), process control (spawn process, kill process, ...),
configuration of the Parallel Virtual Machine (addhost, delhost) and general
MP information.

Apart from that you have a shell for interactive control and watching of your
processes.

But the way you parallelise (concepts, data decomposition, ...) is completely
in your hand. You only use the above mentioned functions, but do the work
completely on your own. This means that the load-balancing is also your task.
Of course you can write your program for doing dynamic redistribution.

But apart from that I think that tools for automatic parallalisation (and
therefore for automatic load-balancing, too) are in a quite early state of
development, so that they are useful only for quite simple cases.

I hope I could answer your question this way.

Bye. Manuela.

