Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: chuang@athena.mit.edu (Weihaw Chuang)
Subject: announcing PLWP Report
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: 12 Jul 1995 06:34:11 GMT
Message-ID: <3tvqd3$a6d@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>

I wrote up documentation for my Advanced Undergraduate Project (AUP)
on the 'PVM Light Weight Process Package' and it has subsequently
become a CSG memo.  Unfortunately I can't distribute source code from
the project, but with luck I'll do so in the future.  

The report can be found at
ftp://csg-ftp.lcs.mit.edu/pub/papers/csgmemo/memo-372.ps.gz

The abstract of the report follows.  
PVM Light Weight Process package or PLWP is a multi-threaded
environment built over the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM).  Its
original purpose was to furnish a laboratory for James Hoe to
experiment with thread scheduling strategies in his FUNi project.
PLWP has since become more flexible, and now permits user-definable
thread scheduling and object passing for general computation.  This is
done through a software specification using virtual-specification
classes, which permits run-time selectable C++ classes that are able
to determine the correct member functions from their class hierarchy.
Written in this fashion, run-time selectable scheduler classes can
save and restore shared contexts, and manage thread selection.
Similarly, object-passing classes can send themselves between threads
of the same task or on separate tasks transparently.  PLWP's
environment enables preemptive context switching, simplifies tasks
naming, and is portable through the use of QuickThreads abstract
thread type.

