PVM 3 beyond network computing

Abstract

PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a byproduct of the heterogeneous network research project going on at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee. It is a software package that permits a user defined collection of serial, parallel, and vector computers to appear as one large distributed memory computer. PVM's popularity is quickly making it the worldwide de facto standard for distributed computing. Applications, which can be written in FORTRAN or C, can be parallelized by using simple message-passing constructs common to most distributed-memory computers. By sending and receiving messages, subtasks of an application can cooperate to solve a problem in parallel. This paper describes the features of the latest release of PVM (version 3.1) and explains the major new research areas we are beginning to explore in heterogeneous network computing. The new features of PVM version 3 open many new opportunities to go beyond simple network computing, but several technical and social issues must be addressed before we can make the next big leap in distributed computing.

This work was supported in part by the Applied Mathematical Sciences subprogram of the Office of Energy Research, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DEAC05-84OR21400, and in part by the the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center Cooperative Agreement No. CCR-8809615.