PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package which permits a heterogeneous collection computers connected by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer.

The S-Lang PVM module provides a S-Lang interface to PVM. By organizing distributed computations with S-Lang, one gains the advantages of programming in an interpreted language.

With this approach, one can make efficient use of all available computer resources: high level logic is handled in interpreted code, CPU intensive work is done in compiled code and PVM simplifies using all available CPUs.

Selected Applications

• Talk describing how the PVM module was used to speed up XSTAR model computations. The associated software is also available.
• Paper describing results from a large-scale X-ray spectral mapping of the supernova remnant Cas A.
• Paper giving examples in which the PVM module was used to speed up relatively routine but very CPU-intensive data analysis tasks.

Documentation

Although the PVM module provides access to a large number of PVM functions, the documentation of the S-Lang interface remains incomplete. However, because the S-Lang interface closely mirrors the documented PVM interface, the PVM documentation serves to answer most questions which arise in practice.

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• PVM
• S-Lang
• PVM module