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 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.

Current PVM News:

• A new Russian translation of the site by Andrew Kovalev is available at http://www.portablecomponentsforall.com/edu/pvm-ru/
• New German translation of the site is available at http://www.pkwteile.de/wissen/pvm-parallel-virtual-machine
• PVM 3.4.6 Released. Includes both Windows and Unix versions and improved use on Beowulf clusters. Also includes the latest patches for working with the latest versions of Linux, Sun, and SGI systems. 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)
  
• Parallel::PVM 1.4.0 Released. Available from CPAN, this perl wrapper for PVM now implements the group functions, supports message sizes greater than 100K and fixes some memory leaks. Available from your friendly CPAN mirror.
• S-Lang PVM The folks at MIT have developed S-Lang bindings for PVM.
• RPVM New release! RPVM is a set of bindings to PVM from R, which is a modern interpreted statisitcal analysis language based on S (from Bell Labs)
• 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.
• 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, port of PVM to R, New distribution of PVM 3.4.5 for Windows.

Current articles from PVM news group comp.parallel.pvm

PVM Documentation:

• Project Overview A short overview of PVM and its features.
• Listing of new features found in pvm3.4 and past PVM versions.
• 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 Overview A short overview of XPVM and its features.
• PVM Technical FAQ for Unix Systems (html version).
• PVM 3.4 installation notes for Windows NT
• Late breaking PVM 3.4 NT news
• Peek into the future and see what we are working on for Harness which is our vision for the "next generation system beyond PVM".

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 source code Latest downloadable PVM source code from netlib.
• PVM 3.4.5+6 distribution for Windows
• PVM test suite and GUI driver (beta) now available.
• PVM 3.3 Quick Reference Card (Postscript)
  Made to be printed and folded into a handy PVM reference.
• XPVM 1.2.1 binaries Downloadable XPVM binaries from netlib.

PVM Programming:

• Troubleshooting PVM Startup What to do when you see, "Error: Can't start pvmd"
• 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 is in the PVM 3.4.4 and later releases.
• Introduction to programming with PVM.
• NAG releases Numerical PVM Library and UT announces official release of
  SCALAPACK - a library of optimized, parallel linear algebra routines using PVM.
• FORGE90 - a commercial tool that automatically parallelizes Fortran codes, using PVM calls if requested.
• VPE - Visual programming environment (produces PVM programs). Prototype software available.
• PADE - NIST has developed a graphical user interface that incorporates all essential tools for development of parallel applications. Current version utilizes the PVM message passing library.
• Trapper - is a graphical programming environment by GENIAS Software. TRAPPER contains components for the parallel software design, hardware configuration, process mapping, process monitoring, graphical software debugging and performance monitoring. Uses PVM when running over clusters of computers.
• PVM Performance Hints
• Debugging PVM programs
  PVM debuggers
  • TotalView - commercial parallel debugger from Etnus (formerly Dolphinics) - well done!
  • Xmdb - parallel programming and debugging trainer for beginners
  • p2d2 - a portable parallel distributed debugger from NASA.
  • AIMS - nice tool developed by NASA
  • CXTRACE - commercial version of AIMS from Convex
  • D.bugger - uses the Expect package to provide an interface to issue debugger commands. (presently works for IRIX and AIX)
• Job Schedulers and Automatic Load Balancers.
  Third party packages that work with PVM include:
  • CONDOR
  • CODINE
  • CraySoft NQE
  • PRM (The Prospero Resource Manager)
  • DQS
  • LSF
  • LoadLeveler .
• Performance Monitors for PVM Programs.
  (send us email if you want to be added to the list:)
  • XPVM 1.1 - 10x faster, and new message queue views.
  • Paradyn - more monitor than debugger (new release available!).
  • PGPVM - produces trace files compatable with ParaGraph.
    A NEW Version called PGPVM2 is now available!
  • PG_PVM - Another package that produces trace files compatable with ParaGraph. (Claims it can also be used to profile MPI programs)
  • PVaniM2.0 - provides online and postmortem visualization.
  • AIMS - nice tool developed by NASA
  • And check out packages in the debuggers list

• Noteable PVM related Software
  If you think you have something to list here let us know
  • S-Lang PVM Micheal Noble and company at MIT have created S-Lang bindings to PVM for all you S-Lang users out there. Enjoy!
  • LPVM LPVM is PVM3 bindings for Common Lisp with UFFI. The developer, Ivan Boldyrev, says patches are welcome.
  • pypvm-0.92 New release! Michael Petullo and Greg Baker have merged their Python-PVM into a single release. Very nice. Check it out.
  • Using Windows MFC with PVM Brian Piscopo describes how to make PVM compatible with MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), including a working example. This allows people to harness the power of PVM while providing easy-to-use GUIs for Windows.
  • IDL to PVM interface. This Interactive Data Language (from Research Systems) interface to PVM lets you perform parallel processing with IDL through PVM calls. It is analogous to the MATLAB toolbox.
  • 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 - new 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.

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  Additional information:

  • Project Members
  • Publications by the our Network Computing project
  • User Survey Results describes who is doing what with PVM around the world.
    The number of PVM users, and the size of the surveys has grown so large that we didn't have time to conduct them and still get our research done. We hope the following information will be helpful.
    Surveys are taken in the Fall of each year (plain text).
    • 1994 Survey Results (794 Kbytes)
    • 1993 Survey Results (330 Kbytes)
    • 1992 Survey Results (168 Kbytes)
  • Photos and results from EuroPVM-MPI'97. The Fourth European PVM - MPI Users' Group Meeting to be held in Krakow, Poland November 3 - 5, 1997.
  • PVM Graphics For your viewing pleasure, some graphics from PVM tshirts and such (postscript).
    
    • PVM inside - make stickers, put them on your terminals.
    • PVM doughboy - the original tshirt design (1992).
    • Doughboy Network - the colander tshirt design (1993).
    • Harness the Power - the dinosaur tshirt design (1995).
    • euroPVM95 - the King Kong tshirt design (1995).
    • It Works! - the cowboy tshirt design (1996).
    • euroPVM96 - CFD Powered by PVM (1996).
    • euroPVM-MPI97 - Krakow Dragon (1997).
  
  

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  URL http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/
  ORNL | CSM
  Email comments to: pvm@msr.csm.ornl.gov
  Last Modified December 5, 2011