Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: ismisa@wi.uni-muenster.de (Mika Saastamoinen)
Subject: Invisible processes?!?!? (pvm_spawn and stuff)
Organization: Wirtschaftsinformatik Uni Muenster
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 1995 18:21:02 UNDEFINED
Message-ID: <ismisa.11.001E7911@wi.uni-muenster.de>

Hello.

I'm a new user of PVM3 (v3.2.6, used in SUN4SOL2 architecture for now, PVM 
consists only of one machine, the workstation I'm sitting at) and I've got a 
truly weird problem. My program needs a number of slaves (I'm using a simple 
master-slaves setup) to do some "serious number crunching" (well, to 
calculate Mandelbrot sets :) for it and it creates the slaves one by one as is 
needed (a sort of primitive "dynamic configuration"-thing). The first slave 
process starts up just fine, but then for some weird reason I start getting 
"invisible slave processes"! I mean, pvm_spawn()'ing the slaves always works 
just fine and gives me (the master program, I mean) the TIDs of the slaves, 
but some of the slaves never send any data back! And these same slaves don't 
even show up when using the PS command in the PVM console! Not to mention the 
normal PS -A command in the normal Unix console; no sign of these slaves... 
Despite that, sending parameters to these "invisible slaves" seems to work 
just fine, as far as I can figure it out... They just never send any data 
back; nothing happens with these "special" slaves... They're created (or are 
they?) and they can be told to do things (I think), but they don't show up 
anywhere (not that I could find out) and they never send anything back to the 
master (that's for sure)... I'm stumped... Has anyone got any idea what might 
be going on? I'm getting a bit desperate... Thanks in advance for your advice.

-MiS-
--
Mr. Mika Saastamoinen (ismisa@wi.uni-muenster.de || mikasaas@utu.fi)
	Comes from Finland, the Funland, but is currently an exchange 
	student in WWU Mnster in Germany. For more information, see
	http://www.utu.fi/~mikasaas


