Design and implementation of PVM version 3

There is a growing trend toward distributed computing writing programs that run across multiple networked computers to speed up computation, solve larger problems or withstand machine failures. A programming model commonly used to write distributed applications is message-passing, in which a program is decomposed into distinct subprograms that communicate and synchronize with one another by explicitly sending and receiving blocks of data.

PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a generic message-passing system composed of a programming library and manager processes. It ties together separate physical machines (possibly of different types), providing communication and control between the subprograms and detection of machine failures. The resulting virtual machine appears as a single, manageable resource. PVM is portable to a wide variety of ma- chine architectures and operating systems, including workstations, supercomputers, PCs and multiprocessors.

In this paper I describe the design, implementation and testing of version 3.3 of PVM, and survey related works.