The requirements of a high performance implementation of PVM

Abstract

PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is currently a de facto standard in the world of distributed computing based on message passing [10]. PVMe is a proprietary realization of the PVM programming model which maintains the full compliance with the original programming interface, but it is specially tuned to obtain higher performances on the SP2, the IBM parallel system based on the POWER 2 architecture and the AIX operating system. During the design and the development of PVMe we had a unique chance to gain clear indications about the aspects of the run-time system support more critical to achieve good results running applications by means of PVM. Hereafter we report about our experience and the (hopefully) useful lesson we learnt.