Tools and auxiliary subsystems in PVM

Abstract

The PVM system is a software substrate for high performance heterogeneous distributed computing on networks of workstations, mainframes, and hardware multiprocessors. PVM itself is similar to a kernel in that it provides functionality for basic operations such as process management and message passing. To augment these core facilities, a large number of tools and auxiliary subsystems have been developed, for a variety of functions such as profiling, visualization, support for other programming paradigms, input and output, etc. In this paper, we describe three such subsystems that enhance the functionality of PVM. PVaniM provides online and postmortem visualization of PVM programs, and is designed specifically for network computing environments. The PIOUS framework supports parallel and distributed I/O to facilitate applications with large data handling requirements. PVM-RPC supports the remote procedure call model to augment message passing in PVM. These tools and extensions to PVM are described, and the nature and effect of their enhancements to PVM are discussed.

Research supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, under Grant No. DE-FG0591ER25105, NASA under grant NAG 2-828, and the National Science Foundation, under Award Nos. ASC-9527186, and CCR-9523544