PVM

PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) provides a common interface for a large number of dif­ferent parallel architectures, ranging from a heterogeneous cluster of workstations to shared memory multiprocessors. It is public software, and you can download it for free. Some vendors have their own optimized implementa­tions of PVM to exploit specific hardware features. Unfortunately, these special versions are not always flawless.

The PVM version of the ADF package, when available, always uses the public version of PVM, and on most platforms it uses the default configuration of PVM.

You will need to know what version of PVM has been used to generate the executables. Usually, correct execution cannot be guaranteed if a different PVM version is used. That information on our web site: http://www.scm.com

If you are not familiar with PVM and need to install it yourself, we strongly suggest you have a look at the PVM documentation. PVM (including FAQ and Users'Guide and Tutorial) can be downloaded from:

http://www.netlib.org/pvm3/index.html

To use PVM you need to:

→ install PVM (see PVM documentation)
→ set two environment variables: PVM_ROOT and PVM_ARCH
→ add $PVM_ROOT/bin/$PVM_ARCH and $PVM_ROOT/lib to your PATH
→ make sure pvm can start the pvmd on all nodes of your system

(you may have to look at .rhosts or ssh issues)

To run in parallel you start the programs as usual, but you (or your batch system, job script, ...) need to start and stop the PVM virtual machine yourself. It is convenient to make a special 'submit' script that handles this for you if you are using a batch system.

→ make submit script to start and stop PVM

Important: you should use

• PVM_ARCH=SGI6 on all SGI IRIX platforms, and
• PVM_ARCH=MACOSX on the Macintosh OS X platform.

If you choose something different you will certainly encounter difficulties.

We strongly advise to use the same version of PVM as we have used to generate and test the ADF package.