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Summary: Goals Guiding Design: PVM and MPI
William Gropp Ewing Lusk
gropp@mcs.anl.gov lusk@mcs.anl.gov
Mathematics and Computer Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Abstract
PVM and MPI, two systems for programming clusters,
are often compared. The comparisons usually start with the
unspoken assumption that PVM and MPI represent differ-
ent solutions to the same problem. In this paper we show
that, in fact, the two systems often are solving different
problems. In cases where the problems do match but the
solutions chosen by PVM and MPI are different, we explain
the reasons for the differences. Usually such differences can
be traced to explicit differences in the goals of the two sys-
tems, their origins, or the relationship between their speci-
fications and their implementations. For example, we show
that the requirement for portability and performance across
many platforms caused MPI to choose approaches differ-
ent from those made by PVM, which is able to exploit the
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