pvm

The message passing mechanism that has been chosen is pvm^10.2. Before using the parallel procedures it is necessary to run pvm. This is usually done by first setting the environment variable PVM_ROOT to the name of the directory where you have installed pvm. Typically this variable should contain something which looks like:

 
/u/PVM/pvm3

Then you create a file, called the hostfile, in which you indicate the name of the slave machine that you intend to use in the parallel computation. An interesting option is to indicate the full path for the pvm daemon program that will be run by the slaves. This option is indicated by the keyword dx=path. A typical hostfile will look like:

 
cygnusx1 dx=/u/PVM/pvm3/lib/pvmd
penfret dx=/u/PVM/pvm3/lib/pvmd
camarat dx=/u/PVM/pvm3/lib/pvmd

Note that you may have as slave computers a mixture of SUN and PC. As soon as this hostfile has been created you run pvm by:

 
pvm hostfile

After some time you will get a prompt and you may verify that all the slave computers have been registered with the command conf. You may then exit from the pvm console program with the command quit (you may also kill the pvm program with the command halt).