PVM a platform for portable distributed computing

摘要

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.