PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a
heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or NT computers hooked together by a
network to be used as a single large parallel computer. Thus large computational
problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and
memory of many computers. The software is very portable. The source, which is
available free thru netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to
CRAYs.
PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much
larger problems at minimal additional cost. Hundreds of sites around the world
are using PVM to solve important scientific, industrial, and medical problems in
addition to PVM's use as an educational tool to teach parallel programming. With
tens of thousands of users, PVM has become the de facto standard for distributed
computing world-wide.
For those who need to know, PVM is Y2K compliant. PVM does not use the date
anywhere in its internals.
Current PVM News:
- Compile problem with Redhat 7.0 and PVM 3.4.3. Redhat changed the
way compilers work between 6.x and 7.0 that causes an error message on
compile. The fix is simple and can be applied manually: You need to change 2
lines in pvm3/src/lpvmpack.c as follows:
line
1827: tc = (char) va_arg(ap, int);
line 1852:
th = (short) va_arg(ap, int);
then recompile. That should do it.
This fix will be in the next PVM release.
- EuroPVM/MPI
2001 EuroPVM/MPI 2001 will be held on Santorini Island (Thera) Greece,
September 23-26, 2001. - see the above link for Call for Papers
- PVM 3.4.3 Released. Includes self-diagnostic install and input from
RedHat Linux and NASA for improved use on Beowulf clusters. New features in
PVM 3.4.x include communication contexts, message handlers, persistent
messages, and interoperablity between NT and Unix clusters.
(See Advanced Tutorial on PVM 3.4)
- PVM
3.4.3 Installshield version for Windows
- pypvm-0.91 New
release! Michael Petullo and Greg Baker have merged their Python-PVM b
into a single release. Very nice. Check it out.
- Peek into the
future and see what we are working on for Harness which is our vision
for the "next generation system beyond PVM".
- Listing of new
features found in pvm3.4 and past PVM versions.
- CUMULVS 1.1
released - a PVM spin-off project makes it easy to add interactive
visualization and steering to your PVM applications or MPI applications. Runs
on anything PVM runs on.
- PVM and MPI: A
Comparison of Features Paper published in Calculateurs Paralleles Vol. 8
No. 2 (1996). Describes differences between PVM and MPI and under what
circumstances one package is favored over the other.
- XPVM 1.2.5 Released! Includes several important modifications to
allow it to work with the latest Tcl/Tk versions, and to work better on most
Linux and Win95 / NT systems. For Win32 users an InstallShield version of
PVM with XPVM included will be released soon! Check this page for the
announcement.
- Some new items added to this page several new additions to "notable
PVM software" developed by third parties around the world, new version of Java
PVM, release of Python port to PVM, New InstallShield version of PVM 3.4 for
Windows NT port
Current articles from PVM news group comp.parallel.pvm
PVM Supported
Architectures
PVM
Documentation:
HTML version of
MIT Press book:
PVM: Parallel Virtual Machine A Users' Guide and
Tutorial for Networked Parallel Computing
How to order your own
copy ($17.95) from MIT.
HTML Man pages for
PVM 3.3.
XPVM 1.1 Tech
Report (3 MB postscript).
PVM Source Code:
PVM Programming: 
- Noteable PVM related Software
If you think you have something
to list here let us know
- Dynamite
Dynamic PVM for dynamic task (re-)allocation of PVM tasks using the
Dynamite Checkpointer also available at the above link.
- PVM Configurator
allows one to create/modify/setup hostfiles and then start them. The big
advantage of this very nice graphical program is to speedup the
configuration of new clusters. (Source Code now available)
- EasyPVM is a C++
wrapper for the PVM libraries. It is intended to be EASY and wrap the
most-used core of the PVM libraries. There are only three classes:
PvmDaemon, PvmTask and PvmStream. PvmStream features unlimited message size
and strong type checking of the variables passed. (Full source code
available)
- APPSPACK a
library of asynchronous and fault tolerant parallel pattern search methods
for optimization. It is particularly useful for engineering optimization
design problems characterized by a small number of variables and by
expensive objective function evaluations.
- PVM
GMake Jean Labrousse has released his Gmake software package.
- PVM Toolbox for
Matlab Javier Baldomero has created a toolkit for calling PVM from
Matlab.
- HP-PVM - fast commercial
PVM clone, with improvements. Supports PVM 3.3 on Windows and Unix as well
as shared memory. Free trial download available
- DAMPVM -
Dynamic allocation and migration extension built on PVM by Pawel Czarnul of
Technical University of Gdansk.
- WAMM
(Wide Area Metacomputer Manager), developed at CNUCE-Institute of the
Italian National Research Council, is a graphical tool, built on top of PVM.
It provides user with a graphical interface to assist in repetitive and
tedious tasks such as: host add/check/removal, process management,
compilation on remote hosts, remote commands execution.
- Fortran 90 PVM
interface - developed by Laurent Gasser, this tar file contains all
the files you need to take advantage of Fortran 90 facilities. It is used in
the current development of the PVM version of his weather forcast numerical
model. Enjoy!
- tkpvm - developed
by Nijtmans in the Netherlands, this package combines the power of tcl/tk
and PVM. Good stuff!
- tclpvm
- this package and a suite of tools based on this package are in the
standard distribution of the Beowulf Linux
distribution. Look for it soon in other Linux distributions!
- PIOUS -
Parallel I/O system for PVM applications. Developed by Vaidy Sunderam and
Steve Moyer.
- Adsmith - is
an object-based DSM totally built on top of PVM, without using any system
dependent facilities. Adsmith employees many performance optimization
techniques to improve its performance.
- WPVM 2.0 - Alexandre
Alves of University of Coimbra - PORTUGAL has created a PVM version for
Microsoft Windows.
- jPVM -
version 1.1.4, which works with PVM 3.4, a native methods
interface to PVM for the Java (tm) platform
- JPVM -
is a PVM-like class library implemented in and for use with Java.
- Perl-PVM
- Perl extension for PVM. Remember think perl think parallel!
- Pypvm is a Python
interface to PVM. Python is probablly the second most popular scripting
language behind Perl. If you use Python, go parallel with Pypvm.
- CPPvm
( C Plus Plus PVM) - a C++ interface to PVM 3.4 written by Steffen
Goerzig. It allows send/recv of C++ objects as well as use of distributed
C++ objects, and more...
- PowerPVM - GENIAS
Software has a high performance versions of PVM for Parsytec Systems.
- Sciddle
- a software package developed at ETH Zurich, Switzerland that enables an
application to use asynchronous Remote Procedure Calls within the PVM
environment.
- SP2 patch For
the those who use the fast SP2MPI port on the IBM SPx, we have a patch to
PVM 3.3.11 for a reported bug that can occur when the cyclic buffer that
holds the outstanding request handles get corrupted. The error message is
"invalid handle in an MPI_Test call". The patch only affects SP2MPI.
Additional information:
This Web site wins an "Academic Excellence Award" and has been selected as a
featured site in StudyWeb as one of the best educational resources (for
Parallel Computing) on the Web
This Web site wins
Links2Go Key Resource Award and has
been selected as a Key Resource in the Parallel Computing
and Distributed
Systems areas.
![CyberTeddy Site]()
This Web site awarded CyberTeddy's Top 500 WebSite
award.
URL http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/
ORNL | CSM
Email comments to: pvm@msr.epm.ornl.gov
Last
Modified June 5, 2001 (421922 external accesses since January 2)
