A parallel distributed environment for Pakistan

Abstract

Parallel distributed computing systems provide mechanisms for exploiting parallelism inherent in many scientific and engineering applications. One such programming environment that has successfully demonstrated operation on a collection of heterogeneous computing elements incorporated by one or more networks is the parallel virtual machine (PVM). It has been used on high end computing resources such as mainframe computers, multiprocessors, hypercubes, and the like. In Pakistan, the most common computing resource is a low cost PC. The abundance of such machines provides an opportunity to develop and use a "poor man's supercomputer". In addition, research on PVM has focused on Unix or similar platforms. None of the formal results, to evaluate certain benchmark applications, are available on Windows-based environments. The work reports the results of the local PVM implementation and compares them with results from conventional implementations of PVM.