NOTE: SCM strongly discourages the use of PVM. It is not actively developed, it does not use recent fast interconnects and it is significantly slower than any modern MPI implementation. So it should only be used as the last resort when no other parallel option works.
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.
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, User's Guide and the Tutorial) can be downloaded from:
http://www.netlib.org/pvm3/index.html
After you've installed PVM make sure the PVM daemon pvmd can be started on all nodes of your system. If pvmd fails to start on (some) nodes you may have to look at .rhosts or ssh/rsh issues. Also make sure that there is no firewall blocking communication between nodes. In case of trouble, you can also find some error messages in the /tmp/pvml.$UID file on the failing node.
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.
