Parallel Virtual Machine Programs (PVM)
Running PVM programs on Lab's cluster
PVM is an application programming interface for writing parallel applications, enabling a collection of heterogeneous computers to be used as a coherent and flexible concurrent computational resource. Scyld has developed the Scyld PVM library, specifically tailored to allow PVM to take advantage of the technologies used in Scyld ClusterWare. A PVM-aware program is one that has been written to the PVM specification and linked against the Scyld PVM library.
A complete discussion of cluster configuration for PVM is beyond the scope of this document. However, a brief introduction is provided here, with the assumption that the reader has some background knowledge on using PVM.
You can start the master PVM daemon on the master node using the PVM console, pvm. To add a compute node to the virtual machine, issue an add .# command, where # is replaced by a node's assigned number in the cluster.
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You can generate a list of node numbers using either of the beosetup or bpstat commands. |
Alternately, you can start the PVM console with a hostfile filename on the command line. The hostfile should contain a .# for each compute node you want as part of the virtual machine. As with standard PVM, this method automatically spawns PVM slave daemons to the specified compute nodes in the cluster. From within the PVM console, use the conf command to list your virtual machine's configuration; the output will include a separate line for each node being used. Once your virtual machine has been configured, you can run your PVM applications as you normally would.
PVM vs. MPI
Why Are PVM and MPI So Different? by William Gropp and Ewing Lusk
