Introduction to Parallel Virtual Machine Project:
This paper discussed about Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) which helps to create and access a parallel computing system and treat the resulting system as a single virtual machine. PVM is designed based on parallel programming’s ‘Message passing model’.
Overview:
Process-based consumption, explicit message passing model, user configured host pool and translucent access to hardware are the principles upon which PVM is developed. The PVM system on a single machine uses pvmd console command and then starts pvmd’s in other machines through a host file. Communication, Process control and user programming interface are few of the PVM components. PVM libraries can initiate and terminate processes, can broadcast messages, can synchronize and can change parallel virtual machine configuration. Programming PVM point-to-point communications takes place in both sending and receiving processes. All of the program executable of PVM are located in PVM architecture specified folder PVM_ARCH.
So, in the machines where PVM program components need to execute in those machines there is a need to create this architecture specified subdirectory. The steps involved in program execution in PVM are installing and configure PVM, designing the application and preparing for PVM session, compiling application comments, creating PVM host file and $Home file, starting the Master PVM Daemon, executing the application and then at last exit the PVM.
PVM libraries pass the portable message so one of the benefits of PVM is its portability. PVM is so flexible and easy to install and use. PVM supports scalable parallelism. PVM is a public domain software and available from NETLIB. PVM is bit slower in performance when comparing to that of other message passing systems because of its architecture and implementation. It also has lack of few message passing functionalities.
Conclusions:
PVM is a easy message passing system to implement. At low cost PVM allows users to exploit the existing hardware to resolve larger problems. For parallel processing of data , PVM provides a distributed computing environment upon the existing computers. High computational problems can get solved by PVM very quickly.
Download Parallel Virtual Machine a Computer Project Topic for Engineering Students .