Parallel Virtual Machine

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"PVM" redirects here. For other uses, see PVM (disambiguation).

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

[edit] Development

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 is free software, released under both the GNU General Public License and the Artistic License.[1]

[edit] See also

Free software Portal

[edit] References

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

  1. ^ PVM README. “This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.”

[edit] External links

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