Parallel Virtual Machine

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The Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a software tool for parallel networking of computers. It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor.

PVM was developed by the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Emory University. The first version was written at ORNL in 1989, and after being rewritten by University of Tennessee, version 2 was released in March 1991. Version 3 was released in March 1993, and supported fault tolerance and better portability.

PVM continues to be actively developed, although its relative maturity and stability mean that new releases are infrequent. It was a significant step towards modern trends in distributed processing and grid computing. It is still widely used, and new bindings (for example the perl Parallel::PVM module) are under active development.

PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or Windows 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 through 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.

[edit] See also

• Virtual machine
• CORBA
• Globus Alliance
• Occam programming language
• Ease programming language
• Linda (coordination language)
• Calculus of Communicating Systems
• Calculus of Broadcasting Systems
• MPI (Message Passing Interface)

[edit] References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

[edit] External links

• PVM home
• PVM++: A C++-Library for PVM
• Free library for code mobility
• PVM in the Parawiki

	Topics in Parallel Computing	v • d • e
General High-performance computing Parallelism Data parallelism • Task parallelism Theory Speedup • Amdahl's law • Flynn's Taxonomy • Cost efficiency • Gustafson's Law • Karp-Flatt Metric Elements Process • Thread • Fiber • Parallel Random Access Machine Coordination Multiprocessing • Multitasking • Memory coherency • Cache coherency • Barrier • Synchronization • Distributed computing • Grid computing Programming Programming model • Implicit parallelism • Explicit parallelism Hardware Computer cluster • Beowulf • Symmetric multiprocessing • Non-Uniform Memory Access • Cache only memory architecture • Asymmetric multiprocessing • Simultaneous multithreading • Shared memory • Distributed memory • Massively parallel processing • Superscalar processing • Vector processing • Supercomputer Software Distributed shared memory • Application checkpointing APIs Pthreads • OpenMP • Message Passing Interface (MPI) Problems Embarrassingly parallel • Grand Challenge