PVM a platform for portable distributed computing

Conference · Wed Jun 01 04:00:00 EDT 1994

OSTI ID:10183744

Geist, G A

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 3.3) and describes the major new research areas being explored in heterogeneous network computing. The paper explains how PVM version 3 opens many new opportunities in distributed computing, and how several technical and social challenges must be addressed before distributed computing can be taken into the 21st century.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-84OR21400
• OSTI ID: 10183744
• Report Number(s): CONF-9409206--1; ON: DE94019156
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
COMPUTER NETWORKS
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTERS
PARALLEL PROCESSING