PVM - More Than 9,000 Copies Distributed

In his welcome address to the First Annual PVM User's Group Meeting, organizer and CRPC researcher Jack Dongarra reported that more than 9,000 copies of PVM were retrieved from Netlib since its first release. PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software infrastructure that allows heterogeneous groups of machines to be used as a general-purpose concurrent computing resource.

The meeting was held in Knoxville, TN on May 10-11, 1993 and was supported by the CRPC, the University of Tennessee, the Department of Energy, CONVEX Computer Corporation, Cray Research, Inc., Digital Equipment Corporation, and Intel Supercomputer Systems Division. More than 100 participants from seven countries attended and 41 speakers gave presentations.

In addition to the wide distribution of PVM, the meeting highlighted several other developments surrounding its release. For instance, a number of machine vendors are providing native or optimized versions for their own systems. Researchers from Cray will use PVM as the message- passing library for their forthcoming T3D MPP machine; Pat Estep from CONVEX described a special version of PVM that talks to their communications hardware. In addition, researchers at Florida State University and Cornell University have used a version of PVM enhanced at IBM to get high performance on fiber optic networks.

"From its preliminary versions all the way through to the current 3.0 release, PVM has shown tremendous potential for applications on heterogeneous networks of computers," noted Dongarra. Dongarra and Robert Manchek from the University of Tennessee, Al Geist from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Adam Beguelin from Carnegie Mellon University, and Vaidy Sunderam from Emory University had previously won a 1992 "Heterogeneous Computing Challenge" award for their project, "PVM Takes over the World." The user's group meeting provided further exposure for other innovative uses for PVM. Dennis Duke from Florida State University (FSU) discussed his PVM experiences at the Supercomputer Research Institute at FSU, where they have a large collection of machines, including 40 IBM RS/6000 machines, a Thinking Machines CM-2, a Cray Y- MP, and various workstations. To this date, more than 14 PVM-related codes are available from various sources.

"A cottage industry has already grown up around PVM," noted Dongarra. "When this growth is combined with PVM's world-wide use, it becomes clear that PVM has become a 'de facto' standard for heterogeneous computing environments."

PVM is available through Netlib. For further information, send email to netlib@ornl.gov . In the message body, type: send index. For a list of PVM-related abstracts and slides available on Netlib, type in the message body: send index from pvm3/pvmug.

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