PVM and MPI: a Comparison of Features

Abstract

This paper compares PVM and MPI features, pointing out the situations where one may befavored over the other. Application developers can determine where their application most likely will run and if it requires particular features supplied by only one or the other of the APIs. MPI is expected to be faster within a large multiprocessor. It has many more point-to-point and collective communication options than PVM. This can be important ifan algorithm is dependent onthe existence of a special communication option. MPI also has the ability to specify a logical communication topology. PVM is better when applications will be run over heterogeneous networks. It has good interoperability between di erent hosts. PVM allows the development of fault tolerant applications that can survive host or task failures. Because the PVM model is built around the virtual machine concept (not present in the MPI model), it provides a powerful set of dynamic resource manager and process control functions. Each API has its unique strengths and this will remain so into the foreseeable future. One area of future research is to study the feasibility of creating a programming environment that allows access to the virtual machine features of PVM and the message passing features of MPI. 1.