Recent Enhancements To Pvm

Abstract

This paper presents new features of PVM, a popular standard for writing parallel programs that execute over networks of heterogeneous machines. Although PVM has become an important infrastructure for paral lel programmers, we continue to develop the system based both on user feedback and our own research interests. In this paper we present new communica tions routines and briefly characterize their perfor mance. We describe new extensible services that allow advanced users to customize certain aspects of the de fault PVM functionality. An overview of shared-mem ory PVM optimizations is presented. PVM's new trac ing facility and a graphical console that utilizes this capability are described. Finally, we discuss future ex tensions to PVM now under investigation.