Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: wongda@eecg.toronto.edu (Daniel Y.H. Wong)
Subject: Re: Does PVM do Load Balancing?
Organization: Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada
Date: 28 Oct 94 14:25:42 GMT
Message-ID: <1994Oct28.102541.18005@jarvis.cs.toronto.edu>

In article <38o1h9$hoa@info2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> zrcc0100@nfhsg2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de (Manuela Sang) writes:
>Hi Peter,
>
>In article <38lr4o$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 parallelization, but a
>message passing system. It offers you functions for message passing (send,
>receive, synchronize, ...), 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 parallelize (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 know that there is a pvm extension from Platform Computing that will
do load-balancing.  You can contact info@platform.com for more information.


-daniel


