Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: edemaine@ug.cs.dal.ca (Erik Demaine)
Subject: Re: what is pvm?
Organization: Math, Stats & CS, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 01:16:05 GMT
Message-ID: <DDA0uu.n3@cs.dal.ca>

Jack Kwong (chkwong@cs.cuhk.hk) wrote:
: Chu Kam Wing (kwchu@cs.cuhk.hk) wrote:
: : 	What is pvm? How can know it more?

: 	PVM stands for Parallel Virtual Machine, which are some
: libraries to facilitate parallel programming. Please refer to PVM Users'
: Guide to learn more about it.

PVM allows heterogenous computing, that is, a network of many types of
workstations and/or "real" parallel computers.  It presents them in a
uniform way, using a message-passing interface.  Linda (a shared-memory
tuple-space paradigm) has been implemented on PVM.  For more info on PVM,
go to the PVM homepage (which includes the PVM book):

	http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html

Oh, BTW, PVM is free and very portable.

You may also be interested in MPI, a message-passing standard implemented
freely (for example) on heterogeneous networks.  Several vendors also have
their own implementations on their parallel computers.  I find MPI very
easy to use, but I haven't worked with PVM much.  MPI has some limitations
(for example, it has no support for process spawning), but also some
advantages (for example, contexts).

MPI homepage:
	http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi

Erik
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