PVM: Experiences, current status and future direction
Adam Beguelin, Jack J. Dongarra, Anton Geist, Robert Manchek, Steve W. Otto, Jonathan Walpole · 1993
The computing requirements of many current and future applications, ranging from scienti c computational problems in the material and physical sciences, to simulation, engineering design, and circuit analysis, are best served by concurrent processing. While hardware multiprocessors can frequently address the computational requirements of these high-performance applications, there are a numberofintegration aspects to concurrent computing that are not adequately addressed when conventional parallel processors are used to solve these problems. The PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) software package provides the software infrastructure for programming heterogeneous networks [4, 1, 3]. PVM provides mechanisms for con guring a virtual machine on a network, initializing processes on this network and communicating among these processes. PVM is a lightweight package intended for user installation. Nearly any Unix or Unix-like machine can be used as a processor in a virtual machine as long as the user has an account on the machine and it is accessible overanetwork. Several existing concurrent applications have been ported to execute on the PVM system, with encouraging results. For example, PVM execution speeds for molecular dynamics simulations (an application with a high volume of communication) using