PVM: Parallel Virtual Machine - A User's Guide and Tutorial for Networked Parallel Computing [Book Review]

Abstract

The field of parallel and distributed computing , like many emerging disciplines, has both promoters and detractors. The debate between these groups gave rise to the Gor-don Bell Prize, which annually recognizes significant achievements in the application of supercomputers to scientific and engineering problems. The 1990 Gordon Bell Prize for price/performance was won by a research group that calculated the electronic structure of a high-temperature superconductor on a 128-node Intel iPSCh860 computer at a cost of $1,2 50 per Mflop. This application was also run on various configurations of net-worked workstations. One configuration of 11 workstations completed the calculation for about $1,430 per Mflop; extrapolation of these figures showed that the cost would drop to $625 per Mflop if one waited longer for the results. This accomplishment was made possible by the availability of fast, cheap scientific workstations and an early version of PVM. Since then, PVM has become enormously popular. It provides a way to collectively mm-age several computers as one and to coordinate distributed applications that execute in this environment. With PVM, users can create applications that exploit the strengths of heterogeneous computing resources. With the message-passing capabilities of PVM, users can implement various parallel-programming paradigms on shared-and distributed-memory computers, including metacomputers composed of networked resources. Both academia and industry are exploiung the cost effectlve-ness of using workstatlon networks as virtual supercomputers, and PVM plays a prominent role in many of these projects. Several computer vendors support the PVM programmng interface, some of whom provide optimized versions for their machmes. This book is precisely what its name implies. It describes the PVM design; com-putlng model and programming interface; and features such as support for process groups, use in commercial multicomputers, and performance in a heterogeneous networked enm-ronment. Despite the book's tutorial nature, readers will benefit most if they are already comfortable with programming in a Unix environment and understand the basic concepts of parallel programming. The book is quite useful as supplementary material in a course on parallel programming that requires use of the PVM system. Chapter 1 introduces network computing and the PVM environment. It discusses the motivation for worhng in a heterogeneous networked compuung enmronment, enabling hardware trends, and other software packages