Parallel virtual machine software allows multiple computers to connect and lend their processing power to solve complex problems. It was created in 1989 and has two parts: the application and the library of interface routines. It supports two models: functional and data parallels. C, C++, and Fortran are the programming languages used. The source code is widely available online.
A parallel virtual machine is a software application that allows multiple independent, geographically distributed computers to connect to each other as a network and lend their system memory and processing power to an application.
The change in manufacturing costs and popularity of the home computer has led to an increase in the accessibility of very powerful computers in the consumer market. These machines are underutilized with their standard software applications, leaving a large amount of processing power free. Parallel virtual machine software allows these resources to be pooled and accessed to solve large and complex scientific, medical, or industrial problems.
The parallel virtual machine was first created in 1989 at Oak Ridge National Labs by Al Geist. Based on the work done, the project was expanded at the University of Tennessee in March 1991 and has grown steadily since then.
A parallel virtual machine system has two parts, the application that resides on the individual machines and the library of interface routines. The software application is called a parallel virtual machine daemon, pvmd3 or pmvd. This little program remains passive until asked to run a parallel virtual machine application. When the user wants to run this kind of program, he has to start the parallel virtual machine first. This allows them to access the software on any other host.
The parallel virtual machine routines library contains a complete list of all the code needed to coordinate the various tasks performed on separate hosts. Included in this library are the standard routines for exchanging messages, coordinating tasks, and any changes to the virtual machine itself.
The concept behind the parallel virtual machine is that any application has several tasks that can run independently. This type of logic is very common in complex scientific calculations. There are two models used in parallel virtual machines; functional and data parallels.
Functional parallels separate an application into clearly defined and independent tasks. These tasks are performed on separate host machines. Parallel virtual machine is used to coordinate based on functions, such as input, solution, output and display.
Data parallelism or SPMD (Single Program Multiple Data) is the most popular method. In this method, all tasks are equal, but each host solves a small piece of the larger puzzle. A parallel VM environment supports both methods, which is important as it may be more efficient to combine these two methods depending on the computations required.
C, C++ and Fortran are the computer programming languages used in parallel virtual machine. These languages were selected because most of the applications used in this environment were created in these languages. The source code for the parallel virtual machine software is widely available on the Internet and can be accessed via ftp, www, xnetlib, or an automated email.
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