Users manual for the Chameleon parallel programming tools.

摘要

Message passing is a common method for writing programs for distributed-memory parallel computers. Unfortunately, the lack of a standard for message passing has hampered the construction of portable and efficient parallel programs. In an attempt to remedy this problem, a number of groups have developed their own message-passing systems, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Chameleon is a second-generation system of this type. Rather than replacing these existing systems, Chameleon is meant to supplement them by providing a uniform way to access many of these systems. Chameleon's goals are to (a) be very lightweight (low over-head), (b) be highly portable, and (c) help standardize program startup and the use of emerging message-passing operations such as collective operations on subsets of processors. Chameleon also provides a way to port programs written using PICL or Intel NX message passing to other systems, including collections of workstations. Chameleon is tracking the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) draft standard and will provide both an MPI implementation and an MPI transport layer. Chameleon provides support for heterogeneous computing by using p4 and PVM. Chameleon's support for homogeneous computing includes the portable libraries p4, PICL, and PVM and vendor-specific implementation for Intel NX, IBM EUI (SP-1), and Thinking Machines CMMD (CM-5). Support for Ncube and PVM 3.x is also under development.