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Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM)
Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM)
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The Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a software tool for parallel networking of computers. It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor.
PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or Windows computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers. The software is very portable. The source, which is available free through netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to CRAYs.
PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much larger problems at minimal additional cost. Hundreds of sites around the world are using PVM to solve important scientific, industrial, and medical problems in addition to PVM's use as an educational tool to teach parallel programming. With tens of thousands of users, PVM has become the de facto standard for distributed computing world-wide.
Background
PVM was developed by the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Emory University. The first version was written at ORNL in 1989, and after being rewritten by University of Tennessee, version 2 was released in March 1991. Version 3 was released in March 1993, and supported fault tolerance and better portability.
Though PVM is not being actively developed, it was a significant step towards modern trends in distributed processing and grid computing.
All text used in this article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Parallel Virtual Machine".