Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: sci30171@leonis.nus.sg (CHIA PARH JIN)
Subject: Re: pvm_config question
Organization: National University of Singapore
Date: 21 Sep 1995 02:42:25 GMT
Message-ID: <43qjeh$sdk@nuscc.nus.sg>

Stephen Scott (sscott@nimitz.mcs.kent.edu) wrote:
: Concerning the function:  int info = pvm_config(nhost, narch, hostp)

: The PVM documentation states that the narch value is an "integer
: returning the number of different data formats being used."  What
: exactly is meant by <different data formats>?

: This question came about as I have a program running on a virtual
: machine which consists of (1)-SUN4 and (1)-HP7x and it returns for
: narch the value 1.  And curiously, when running the same
: application on only the (1)-SUN4 it still returns the value of 1 for
: narch.

: So what exactly is this "data format" and what does this number
: returned as narch represent?  It obviously is not referring to a
: different machine architecture.

I always thought that it means how the data is represented in the hosts.
like word size, 2's complement or not, big endian or little endian
and similar things which can be the same or different for different
computers.

Now here, as your SUN and HP has the same data format, I suppose you can
do `pvm_initsend(PvmDataRaw)' instead of `pvm_initsend(PvmDataDefault)'
before doing packing of data for sending as no conversions are necessary
between the hosts.


Cheers
--
Chia Parh Jin|Physics, Computational Science|National University of Singapore
Email: chiapj3@leonis.nus.sg | chiapj3@galaxy.cz3.nus.sg
<a href="http://www.cz3.nus.sg:8100/~chiapj3/>My Page</a>

Special Relativity - What You See Is What You Get. :-o

