=============================================================================== ===== Following was posted to comp.parallel.pvm ===== ===== and mailed to those who requested PVM from netlib@ornl.gov by email ====== ===== (did not include netlib accesses by ftp or Web or netlib mirror sites)=== =============================================================================== Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 19:51:45 -0500 From: pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu Subject: PVM survey Dear Colleague, In order to improve PVM we are trying to understand how people are using the system. Your feedback is important. Could you take a moment to answer three questions. Are you using PVM today? What are your application(s)? How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. Your help is much appreciated. Best wishes, The PVM Project Team =============================================================================== From: bunge@kokopelli.lanl.gov (Peter Bunge) 1. Are you using PVM today? Yes 2. What are your application(s)? Computational Fluid Dynamics, i.e. 3D-spherical high resolution modeling of convection in the earth's mantle 3.How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? a) heterogenous cluster (2 SUN,1 HP,1 SGI, 1 DEC-ALPHA) b) homogenous clusters(16 node IBM, 8 node HP, 8 node DEC-ALPHA) c) massively parallel machines (Cray T3D, IBM SP2) --------------------- comments and suggestions: 1) I would like to see a spawning routine, that can take double precision input. This is useful, since I compile my codes with double prec compiler flags and always have problems when spawning my tasks. 2) I would like to see the number of pvm-routines kept limited. ;-) 3) My overall evaluation and experience with PVM ( I have been using it for 2.5 years ) is extremely positive. Setting the defacto standard for message passing and encouraging network computing is one of the most helpful developments in computational physics right now. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hans-Peter Bunge Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics ( IGPP ) Los Alamos National Laboratory & Geophysics Dept UC Berkeley PHONE : (505) 665 2863 -> office; FAX : (505) 665 3107 EMAIL : bunge@kokopelli.lanl.gov Mail : IGPP , Los Alamos National Laboratory Mail Stop C 305 Los Alamos, NM 87545 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jhh@texaco.com (Joe H. Higginbotham) >Are you using PVM today? I am running PVM as I answer this message. The job is running over the network using 8 RS6K machines and 2 SUN4 machines. The largest number of machines I've run on the network together is 40. These were a mixture of SGI's, SUN's, and IBM's. I generally run from 10 to 20 processors using PVM. Right now the code I'm most interested in running has some problem on the SGI's which is why they are not part of my current virtual machine. > >What are your application(s)? My applications are seismic processing programs. Right now I'm processing data from the North Sea to image a gas field at a depth of 3.5 Km. The image will be used to decide the extent of the field. > >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I've run 40 machines on a single problem. I use SGI's, SUN4's, and IBM's. > >Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. >Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. > - On shared memory multiprocessor machines it would be useful to be able to define a memory buffer which all the processors could access. For example if you are modeling waves traveling through a medium such as the earth it is inconvenient to have to keep a copy of the medium paramteres (velocity, density, etc.) in memory for each processor when they all share memory and could read these parameters from the same place. Joe Higginbotham, Texaco ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dear PVM: This a reply to your survey request. We are a group with offices throughout the Health Center of the University of Pittsburgh including offices in 5 hospitals, the School of Engineering, and the medical school. (1) Yes we are using PVM today and every day. (2) We are running one application at this time. It is conceptually a client/server application. The servers provide access to files which contain neurophysiological data from surgical patients being monitored in the operating room. Data is collected continuously, processed, and then saved to the file about every 40 seconds. Each time new data appears in a file. Any observer process (client) connected to the virtual machine can access the data through the local server process running on the machine on which the data is being acquired. The client processes run constantly, whether they are in use or not. The data acquisition equipment includes a workstation mounted in a wheeled instrumentation cart. When a case is scheduled, a cart is wheeled into the operating room, attached to the Ethernet running through the hospitals, and booted. A script running on the base node (the node where PVM was started) detects the booting node and spawns a pvmd and a server process on it. Using this approach we routinely run the same virtual machine for many weeks at a time between halts. This application using PVM primarily for its message passing and dynamic group capabilities. The dynamic grouping is used to provide several fault tolerance measures. We are currently developing two computational applications which will utilize the same client/server architectural approach. Because our machines are constantly in use but produce mostly spare cycles, we hope to use perhaps 20% - 50% of those cycles with PVM applications. Both applications involve identification and display of time varying data. The simpler one will be used in the operating room to reduce the time required to provide feedback to the surgeon from 30-40 seconds to 5-10 seconds. The second is an image processing application which will be developed on our network and then ported to a network with higher communication bandwidth, perhaps the ALPHA cluster at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. (3) Our virtual machine includes 30 - 40 HP9000/700 RISC workstations and an SGI Personal IRIS. Several of the HP boxes are off site: Mount Sinai Hospital (New York City), George Washington University Hospital (Washington, D.C.), and the offices of Computational Diagnostics Inc., a local private practice firm which provides intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring in several community hospitals in the Pittsburgh area. We also have a network of HP/Apollo MC68040 workstations running the AEGIS operating system which are used in the operating room. We are seeking a PVM port for this operating system. COMMENTS and SUGGESTIONS: We are extremely pleased with PVM and wish to express our gratitude to the developers and the government agencies which support their work. We have had very little trouble and have been able to generate production software for use in our large clinical service is 2 man months based on PVM. We are of course highly concerned with fault tolerance, as our applications are time critical and can be life critical. For the future we would like to have a fault tolerant version of PVM, one which has the which in particular is tolerant to failure of any node in the virtual machine, particularly the base node, i.e. the first one on which PVM is started. Local caching of the virtual machine configuration at every pvmd along with the planned static group function would make the package far more robust in the face of base node failure as well as network segmentation. It would also be helpful, although I suspect very difficult, to provide a mechanism whereby two independent virtual machines could be merged into one without having to halt one of them. Another improvement would be a threaded version of PVM. Finally, for optimization purposes, it might be worthwhile to have a receive-in-place function (there is already send-in-place) rather than having to unpack at the reading end. Thank you again. Don Krieger (412)692-5093 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dear PVM: Please add the following to the paragraph in our survey response in which we discuss the life critical nature of our work. : We have been careful to construct the software so that life critical no potentially critical function depends exclusively on PVM, but only of the software n the software running on the local workstation in the operating room. Thanks, Don Krieger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: : Are you currently using PVM? Yes. : What are your application(s)? Mobile robot simulator under X, mobile robots are connect to the world simulator via PVM, also using GNU Scheme with self written extensions to the language to allow PVM to talk to the world interactively from a Scheme top level. : How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Couple of Suns only. : Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Its wonderful :-) Keep it coming. : Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. : Your help is much appreciated. Thank you indeed for such well documented software. : Best wishes, : The PVM Project Team cheers, al ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: laprade@dw3f.ess.harris.com (Ken Laprade) > > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? Course-grained image processing algorithms written in C++. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Dozens of Sun's running SunOS 4.1.3 and 5.3, one 8-CPU SparcCenter 2000, a few SGI Indy's and soon a SGI Challenge. -- Ken Laprade Email: klaprade@harris.com Harris Corporation Voice: (407)984-5727 PO Box 98000, MS W2/7744 or: (407)984-6691 Melbourne, FL 32902 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: drahzal@c1south.convex.com (Matthew Drahzal) > > Are you using PVM today? Yes- PVM is portable method to write parrallel apps... > > What are your application(s)? Mostly Financial Analysis > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > mainly the Convex Exemplar, but have also used PA-RISC clusters and Convex C-Series... > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. Keep up the good work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dwayne Car > > Are you using PVM today? Yes! > > What are your application(s)? CEM codes. Currently our high frequency codes CADDSCAT and CAVERN both use PVM. They are physical optics and ray trace based codes. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? HP only. We may start using it on our Intel hypercube to maintain one version of the code. The most machines I have run on is 62 HP systems at one time. Please do not ask me to locate them. > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. We would like to use PVM on our low frequency CEM code CARLOS. It was used to win the Gorden Bell award this last year and is used by the EMCC (Electromagnetic Code Consortium). We just can't find an out-of-core LINPACK/LAPACK that works with PVM. Any suggestions? Does one exist? My only frustration during installation... pvm3/lib/pvm claims it will set PVM_ROOT to default to ~pvm3. A minor adjustment makes this work. I also stick the #!/bin/ksh at the top. The tilda does not work in the Bourne shell. My only frustration during use... Many times a host will be okay and the network will go away for just few minutes. It is unfortunate that a few minutes later the host is decleared dead and everything hangs. It would be nice such that even if the computer is declared dead, if it could come back to life and reattach to the virutal machine where it left off. -- Dwayne D. Car Email: m229708@mail.mdc.com Senior Project Engineer Email: m229708@mdcgwy.mdc.com McDonnell Douglas Corporation Email: m229708@aello.mdc.com P.O. Box 516 MC 064 2263 Phone: (314) 232-7103 St. Louis, MO 63166 Fax : (314) 232-7774 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mhsmith@nas.nasa.gov (Merritt H. Smith) > > Are you using PVM today? > Yes. We have version 3.3.* installed on all of our systems. > > What are your application(s)? > Three-dimensional compressible viscous flow solution over complete aircraft. Numerical aerodynamic optimization of complete aircraft. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > IBM PC (pentium): 4 systems running Free BSD connected by Ethernet. SGI Workstations, HP Workstations: 30+ systems. IBM SP2: 160 nodes. Cray C90: Used PVM in place of multi-tasking (works well, but uses too much memory to be useful) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ |Merritt H. Smith | Bug-free code, | |Applied Computational Aerodynamics Branch | Rapid convergence, | |MS 258-1 | Peace on Earth, | |NASA Ames Research Center | A dependable Jaguar. | |Moffett Field, CA 94035 | | | | | |mhsmith@nas.nasa.gov (415)604-4493 | Is that too much to ask? | |http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~mhsmith/home.html | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: ptn@chevron.com (Phuong T. Nguyen) >Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? With MCNP code from Los Alamos Lab. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? IBM RS/6000 ~7 HP 735 2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: dianne@cbi5.cbi.com (Dianne Marsh) > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? Human Genome Project -- Sequence Analysis > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? We use SUN workstations but are planning to port to other UNIX environments. It is also likely that we will incorporate some other architectures (e.g. MasPar). We have combined Solaris 1 and Solaris 2 machines and have used up to 20 machines in a distributed fashion. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Are you using PVM today? No, but I've used it recently. What are your application(s)? Optimization (expected values) and PDE's. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 4 to 6 Sun workstations. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Installation was a bit clumsy for a user who's not a systems person. The manual didn't have a complete (or any, in some cases) description of certain commands. The daemons on host machines were difficult to exorcise. {It's still a great addition to the modeling community. Keep up the good work.} ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- James E. Giles Phone (615) 632-1980 Fax (615) 632-1840 TVA Engineering Lab, LAB 1A-N x.400:/c=us/admd=attmail/prmd=gov+tva/ P.O. Drawer E s=Giles/g=Jim/dd.id=idvi8.office/ 126 Pine Road Internet:tva!idvi8.office@mhs.attmail.com Norris, TN 37828 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: meiji!kendo!adc@uunet.uu.net (Alan Cabrera) > > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? Parallel path integration. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 50 SPARCstations 2, 10, and 20s. Alan D. Cabrera Email: adc@sanwaBGK.com Sanwa Financial Products Co., L.P. Phone: (212) 407-3591 55 East 52 Street - 26th Floor FAX: (212) 758-9552 New York, NY 10055 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: PVM Survey Reply: > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > > What are your application(s)? We are using it to parallelise Computed Tomography (CT) Reconstruction based on algebraic reconstruction technique (ART). > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 3 Sun SparcII running SunOS 4.1.3 3 Sun SparcII running Solaris 2.3 2 HP-UX. Thank you, Binu John. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: sanz@lace01.lerc.nasa.gov (Jose Sanz) Please, disregard previous e-mail if you received it. Yes, I use PVM now on a routine manner. My application is " Aerodynamic Inverse Design and Analysis for a Full Engine". I use PVM to run this application on two CRAY C90s. My host is an IBM RS6K-590. I use PVMe on an IBM SP2-160 nodes at NASA Ames. After a problematic installation of PVMe on the SP2 ( it was creating a lot of orphan jobs) now runs excellently. The use on the C90s is rather interactive, whereby I spwan processes from my RS6K host on either C90 as needed. Mostly, this processes run almost independently of each other and with practicly no limit on the number of processes that I am running. ( Among other things PVM has resulted to be an excellent scheduler). On the SP2 I run parallel jobs that require large internode comunications. SP2 runs those jobs on dedicated time. The internode comunication overhead I fund to be very reasonable for the problem I am solving. Congratulations for an excellent piece of work. I can expand, or send you some results on the SP2 if you are interested. J. Sanz NASA Lewis Research Center (216) 433-5917 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: ytassa@fluids4.rdd.lmsc.lockheed.com (Y. Tassa) I am using the PVM and the applications are flow field,and fluid/structure codes primerily two kinds of machines Dec 5000 workstations and SGI . I would like to get detailed doc. on the recent PVM version. Y.Tassa ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Terry Purnell 1) Are you using PVM today? Yes. 2) What are your application(s)? Real-time distributed interactive combat simulations. 3) How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 20+ Sun (SPARC 10, LX), SGI (Indigo, Elan, Onyx), SGI Challenge Cluster, CM-5, SP2. 4) Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. I frequently have to run demonstrations on experimental network and hardware configurations. My team has been actively developing distributed processing applications using PVM for over a year and the most difficulty we have had associated with PVM is getting it to start-up properly on the distributed architecture under the experimental network. Since I am required to develop software for use by researchers who aren't very familiar (or patient) with distributed processing what we could really use are good tools for diagnosing PVM start-up problems. Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. Terry Purnell U.S. Army Research Laboratory ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: baker@jake.plk.af.mil (Lou Baker) Are you using PVM today? YES. What are your application(s)? PSPH, a parallel smoothed particle hydrodynamics code. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Mostly on SP-2 at Maui hpcc. Have run problems with approx 1/2 million particles for many hours simulating large impacts and explsions. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Daemons die when NFS at maui goes down. This creates problems as the NFS ons the SP-2 seems to be somewhat unstable. The result is the program dies (with Signal 15). However, the job appears to be suspended, with resources tied up. It appears(?) that pvmcleanup may not cancel/remove all the suspended processes, thus inconveniencing other users. (The last two sentences are based upon the report of another user.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mwtraha@sandia.gov (1241 Michael W. Trahan) Are you using PVM today? Yes. What are your application(s)? Particle-in-a-cell codes (physics). How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? IBM RS-6000 2 to 4 Sun SPARCstation 10 and 20 10 to 15 Sun SPARCserver 1000 8 CPUs IBM SP2 2 to 256 nodes Intel Paragon 2 to 128 nodes Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. The ability to use IBM PC-compatibles in the virtual machine would be useful, especially during development. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Burke Murray Are you using PVM today? Yes What are your application(s)? Computational Fluid Dynamics (Panel Method) How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Only the Cray (YMP to T3D) so far, but I hope to use PVM with networked workstations in the future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: krishnan@beavis.bnpi.com (Krishnan Ethirajan) Are you using PVM today? Yes. What are your application(s)? Quantum Mechanics/Statistical Mechanics - Molecular Modeling. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 30 Machines, IBM RS/6000. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jmckir@uwaf.nswc.navy.mil (John B. McKirgan) Are you using PVM today? Yes. What are your application(s)? I am using an application developed by the Department of Energy (Sandia National Labs). The application is called PCTH. It is a eulerian hydrocode we use to model shock physics and impact dynamics problems. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? The only kind of machine has been Hewlett Packard 700 series workstations. The number of machines varies from 4 to 8. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Let me start with my compliments. PVM so far as been a solid package that installed with ease. The only problem I had was in compiling the example problem "xep". I did not have some of the include files (Toggle.h, Form.h etc.) Though, in all honesty, I did not spend a great deal of time on it. My main concern with PVM is it's continued funding. I am now at a point in planning future hardware purchases where I have to decide whether to pursue a low-end massively parallel machine "OR" continue to accumulate workstations. My budget does not allow for both. Much of the software I have been seeing that does my kind of problems, is developed on MP machines like the Intel Paragon. If the software isn't ported to PVM, I've got a problem. Further, I'm not a big enough player to force these software developers to make the ports. I have spoken to my hardware vendors (HP, Digital). My sales reps are not familiar with PVM; which is disturbing. I guess you could summarize this as a technology transfer concern. For now, PVM is the way for me to run problems to big to fit on one machine. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: ram@eniac.cf.com (Ram Pandit) Subject: Re: PVM survey Following are the answeres to your questions : 1. Currently, we are not using PVM. I used it to implement a Branch-and Bound algorithm for learning purposes. However, we are excited about PVM and whenever the opportunity arises, we shall use it. 2. Most of applications are large-scale mixed integer programming problems. For example, Airlines Fleet-Planning, Truck dispatching etc. 3. At present we have two RISC/6000-580 machines hooked together. So far, I have a very limited experience with PVM to really offer you any significant suggestion. However, thanks for PVM its a great tool. ----------------------------------------------------- Ram Pandit Sr. Systems Engineer Intelligent Systems Engineering Consolidated Freightways, Inc. P.O. Box 6696 Portland, OR 97208-6696 Wk: (503) 499-3114 Fax: (503) 499-3947 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: pbd@winternet.com (Paul Dokas) > Are you using PVM today? yes > What are your application(s)? learning to program in a parallel environment > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 3 machines: Sun, NetBSD on a PC, SGI paul ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Maciej Kormicki - EECS (EE476)" > > Are you using PVM today? > Yes, I am using PVM. > What are your application(s)? > I am using PVM for my research which is "parallel logic simulation on a network of workstations using PVM" > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > So far I used simultaneously 4 machines. I am using HP workstations. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: og845@carbon.pnl.gov (Edoardo Apra) I am not using PVM at the moment, but I could use it again in the future. I used pvm3.2 with Crystal92 (a solid-state quantum chemistry code) I used pvm with the following architectures: RS6K, HP, SGI, DEC alpha, Convex, Cray C90 Regards, Edoardo Apra` ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jyan Hong-Wei > Are you using PVM today? No. > > What are your application(s)? Try to build up a distribute and transparent computation environment for our users, who are not familiar with computer. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Currently, we only got 9 workstations and mainframe to run PVM. Those include 3 HP, 1 Sun, 1 SGI, 1 Dec, 1 Dec-Alpha, and 2 Cray. After we can understand the PVM totally, we will install it over our whole network system. Thanks. -- +----------------------------------------+-------------------------------+ | Name: Hong-Wei ( Howard ) Jyan | | | e-mail: howard@gwya.cwb.gov.tw | "A city is a large community | | Org.: Central Weather Bureau / CWB, | where people are lonesome | | Taiwan, ROC. | together..." | | Div.: System Control Section. | | | Phone: +886-2-3491288 | | +----------------------------------------+-------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Larry Wickstrom Are you using PVM today? No. What are your application(s)? Video Compression How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 5 SGI Indigo machines ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Steve Johnson Are you using PVM today? Yes What are your application(s)? Monte Carlo simulations of 2D and 3D magnetic systems How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 32 Sun SS10 32 HP 735 Steve Johnson E-mail: Steve.Johnson@math.tamu.edu Unix Systems Manager Phone: (409) 845-0261 Dept of Mathematics FAX: (409) 845-6028 Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-3368 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: hicup@fatman.tamu.edu (Hagop Barsamian) To whom it may concern, In response to the three questions: -- I am currently not using PVM. -- I have used PVM on an HP Apollo series (720) and a SUN Spark 10 workstations. From: Stas Polonsky >Are you using PVM today? >What are your application(s)? >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? >Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. >Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. >Your help is much appreciated. Q1: Yes. Q2: Optimization of superconductor digital electronics circuits. Q3: 3 HP 700, 1 SGI Indy -- +-----------------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | Stas V. Polonsky, Ph.D. | Internet: stas@rsfq1.physics.sunysb.edu | | Physics Department, | Voice: (516)632-8060 | | SUNY - Stony Brook, | Fax: (516)632-8774 | | Stony Brook, NY 11794-3800 | | | U.S.A. | | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: rnagaraj@cne.gmu.edu (Sai Ravi Nagarajan) Are you using PVM today? Yes. What are your application(s)? Distributed scheduling algorithms, performance measurements, etc. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Upto a maximum of 32 workstations. Usually use Sun and HP workstations. Ravi Nagarajan. Dept of CS, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mohamed Iskandarani > > Are you using PVM today? Yes I am. I do not use it on a daily basis, but we have a code that relies on PVM. > What are your application(s)? We have a spectral element code to solve the shallow water equations. Our main focus is basin-scale ocean modeling. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? The code runs on the nCUBE 2 and on the T3D. The orginal parallelization was carried out on an nCUBE 2 since our university owns one, and we have unlimited access to it at no charge. The message passing was based on the nCUBE's native message passing library. We ported the code to the T3D and decided to base the message passing on PVM. Our code is not 100% portable since we rely on Cray call (fast_send and fast_receive) to bypass the slow PVM calls. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hemant Rotithor 1. yes 2. distributed branch and bund 3. cluster of alpha stationsdecstations ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "William T. Rankin" > Dear Colleague, I guess you mean me... :-) > In order to improve PVM we are trying to understand how > people are using the system. Your feedback is important. > Could you take a moment to answer three questions. No problem. > Are you using PVM today? Yes. In fact, as I type this I am. > What are your application(s)? Personally, I have used PVM for the following applications. 1) Molecular Dynamics - As part of an NSF "Grand Challenge" Grant, we have used PVM to implement various multipole algorithms for solving large N-body interaction problems. The resulting libraries have been succesfully integrated into the NAMD Moleculer Dynamics package from UIUC (which also runs under PVM) Hopefully, in the new few months, we will have the XPLOR MD package from Yale use these codes. 2) As part of my Masters research, I implemented distrributed codes to identify numerical sequences known as Golomb Rulers. This search could be likened to a prime number search. I implemented a fault tolerant, restartable parallel code which ran for over three months on a network of 27 workstations and discoversd a new unknown sequence. 3) A proof-of-concept project implementing Active Messages under PVM using Unix signals. In addition to my own work, I support the installation ov the PVM package for the EE department here at duke, where it is used by gradutes and undergraduates for classes and research. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I have run PVM on the following platforms, and use most of them regularly. 1) A cluster of Sun workstations under Solaris 2.3 and ethernet 2) A group of IBM RS6000 3) A cluster of HP 735's with ATM 4) A Cray T3D (32 proc and a 512 proc) 5) A 486 clone under Linux. (My home machine) > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. (Active Messages ;-) > Best wishes, > The PVM Project Team Regards, -bill ---- / __/ / / bill rankin / / / wrankin@ee.duke.edu ___ / / / / philosopher/coffee-drinker / / / / / molecules-R-us / / / / / _______/ __/ __/ __/ "All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die." - Sheryl Crow ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: BHASKAR We are using PVM in our Distributed systems course for developing simple projects. We use LINUX on PCs, RS/6000, and possibly VMS and Ultrix on VAXs. Will send suggestions as I - professor of CS in Winona State University, CS Dept. - put them together. PVM has been quite useful for us - thank you. Sudharsan Iyengar (507) 457-5539 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: sliu@spectra.eng.hawaii.edu (Sheng Liu) > Are you using PVM today? No. But I used PVM last spring. > > What are your application(s)? Vector quantization using Kohonen self-organizing feature map. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? about 10 Sun workstations > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Dr. Eric C. Frey" > > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > > What are your application(s)? We are doing 3D image reconstruction for single-photon emission computed tomography. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > We are using DEC Alphas and DECstations. We have a few stardent computers but haven't been able to get it to run on them. We recently bought an HP computer, but haven't ported our stuff to it yet. > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. > My student has been doing the programing so I can't make a lot of comments about this. I will forward it to him. =============================================================================== Eric C. Frey Phone: 919-966-6729 Research Assistant Professor Fax: 919-966-2963 Department of Biomedical Engineering and e-mail: frey@bme.unc.edu Department of Radiology The University of North Carolina 152 MacNider Hall, CB 7575 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: > > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > > What are your application(s)? Robotics and machine vision, having a distributed pvm program govern many real time processes controlling robots and vision HW. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Sun sparc 2000 (8 proc), 12 & 8 proc SGI 480, and single processor servers and workstations in our network. > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. The shared memory version for Sun solaris used shmemget with ID #1 or 2 or something stupid like that. Of course we had other programs just as badly written using the same ID#, inadvertedly adressing the same memory. Caused spectacular crashes before we corrected it. Better debugging aids are always welcome. We haven't been able to spawn pvm processes in a debugger window for some unknown reason. An email address list of users who struggle with real time applications, and maybe some sample real time type software for different systems availible by ftp would be great. /m ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jbm@speedy.login.qc.ca (John McCluskey) > > Are you using PVM today? Not at the moment. In the future, perhaps. > > What are your application(s)? I took a class at McGill University in Parallel Processing, and used PVM for a programming assignment where I implemented the Chandy-Misra-Hauss deadlock detection algorithm. It was surprisingly easy with PVM. When I get more time, I'll probably use PVM for implementation of parallel Monte-Carlo simulations on the workstation network where I work. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? single host Intel 486 pc-clone running Linux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Steven M. Gallo" > > Are you using PVM today? > Yes, but currently only a specialized version that Cray Research has implemented for use on their MPP T3D. > What are your application(s)? Molecular structure determination. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > Cray T3D, but I have been considering downloading it to test on a network of Linux boxes. Steve Gallo ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: attilio@di.unito.it (Attilio Giordana) Are you using PVM today? YES What are your application(s)? We are developing distributed genetic Algorithms. In particular we have a learning system "REGAL" which is based on PVM. We are distributing it by ftp "pianeta.di.unito.it (anonymous) How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? We use our system in two sites: (a) a LAN of several SparcStations. (b) a CM5 in Paris (through internet) Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. We found the system quite delicate under CM5. If you are interested we could start a discussion. In any case REGAL at least works on it!!!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: yuexia@spectra.eng.hawaii.edu (Yuexia Liao) > > Are you using PVM today? No. I used it last year for my master thesis > > What are your application(s)? compare load balancing schemes > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 20, including SUN Spac, HP300, HPPA workstations ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Grimshaw Dear PVM Project Team, Thank you for soliciting my opinion. Unfortunately, I don't have much information to send since I am a rank newbie for PVM. We have so far not taught any parallel computing at Ryerson Polytechnic University (Toronto). I obtained PVM after seeing the news group on netnews. Started 'fooling around' with it Dec 94. To answer your questions, 1) use: teaching (potentially) 2) applications: student undergrad thesis projects (potentially) 3) Installations i) Sun Sparcstation multiprocessor (4) system SunOS 5.3 (Seems to only like running one pvmd3 per processor) ii) Sun single processor Sparc with SunOS 5.3 iii) IBM RS6000 Aix 3.2, one processor. The above systems are at the University and linked by a fibre optic backbone. Have run some of the PVM demos. iv) i486 running Linux v) i386 running Linux These two are linked (at home) via an ethernet connection. Regards, David Grimshaw ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Anshu Aggarwal > Are you using PVM today? -- I was till last month > What are your application(s)? -- 1) Benchmarking applications to measure communication timings between processes. 2) Large scale aerodynamic code to study the effects of fluid turbulence on aircraft structures. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? -- SPARC Stations, Dec ALPHAs, KSR-1, Cray T3D, CM-5, Intel Paragon. > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. -- There are numerous issues that arose upon porting of applications to the multiprocessors, primarily dealing with how processes were spawned on the different processors and with the pecularities of the implementation of PVM on that machine (PVM was not completely portable from one multiprocessor to another). We also did not have much success in distributing the applications over the different multiprocessors and having them communicate with each other. It was also unclear how good the implementation of PVM was on the different multiprocessors since sometimes there was a significant difference in performance between a PVM program and a program written using the native message-passing calls. If you have any further questions, please dont hesitate to contact me at anshu@cs.colorado.edu -anshu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Al Bessey > > Are you using PVM today? Yes, in relation to my masters thesis. > What are your application(s)? Parallelizing the Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Model. Basically, the code tracks a cloud of pollutants through the atmosphere, given atmospheric data from RAMS. (Regional Atmospheric Modelling System.) > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I have used an isloated ethernet network of 7 IBM RS/6000 workstations, and am currently trying to port the code to the Intel Paragon. The port is being held up by my code, not PVM. > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. There are many codes still using PVM 2.4 and you should continue to publish the 2.4 to 3.x.y conversion sheets, possibly as a section in the users' guide. I was lucky enough to have an old copy of the conversion sheet in an old folder, but I would bet many are not that lucky. BTW - I received 4 copies of this message. Al Bessey -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ For lack of a Dream...his life was lost....... When a man knows not the harbor for which he is headed, no wind is the right one for his sails. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ | Al Bessey - Intel PSE | E-Mail: bessey@ssd.intel.com | | California Institute of Technology | Office: (818) 356 - 0335 | | 1201 E. California Blvd | FAX : (818) 584 - 5917 | | M/S 158-79 | Pager : (800) SKYPAGE Pin:870-3437 | | Pasadena, CA 91125 | | +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: alves@mercurio.uc.pt (Alexandre Alves) > >Are you using PVM today? I am not a common PVM user: I am developing a PVM API for MS Windows (16/32). >What are your application(s)? We will see in the future, but now I am thinking just about benchmarks. >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Just a few PCs (80x86 based). Best wishes, Alex ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Alexandre A. R. Alves Departamento de Eng. Informatica tel: 351.39.7000000 (global) Universidade de Coimbra tel: 351.39.7000072 (direct) Polo II tel: 1236 (local) Vila Franca- Pinhal de Marrocos fax: 351.39.701266 3030 COIMBRA - PORTUGAL email:alves@pandora.uc.pt ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: j killough We are using PVM for parallel finite difference codes for flow in porous media. The primary platforms are IBM/RS6000's of various sorts (550,560, 590). The only complaint I have is that at least in version 3.1, it is not straightforward to redirect the output from the parallel tasks. I would prefer the ability to direct the output from a parallel task to any given dataset. This is particularly useful in debugging. Is the x version of pvm stable at this point? When I discussed this with someone in July, there were still a few bugs. Thanks, John Killough ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ahmed Ouenes Response to pvm-survey 1)Yes I am using PVM today more than ever 2)Geoscience applications Reservoir Characterization Reservoir History Matching using Numerical Simulators Parallel Optimization Algorithms 3) I used 6 IBM RISC 600 (590), HP 9000-735, SUN SPARC 10 I have comments but they are too long to write in an e-mail I have also couple of papers describing briefly my applications and the way I am using PVM. Feel free to use these references for anything that may support and encourage the use of PVM. Ref 1. Ouenes Ahmed, Srinivasa Bhagavan, Peter H. Bunge, and Brian Travis: Application of Simulated Annealing and Other Global Optimization Methods to Reservoir Description: Myths and Realities paper SPE 28415 presented at the Society of Petroleum Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhbition, New Orleans, 25-28 Spetember 1994. Ref 2. Ouenes Ahmed, William Weiss, Ahmad J. Sultan, and Jabed Anwar: Parallel Reservoir Automatic History Matching Using a Network of Workstations and PVM paper SPE 29107 presented at the 1995 Society of Petroleum Engineers Symposium on Reservoir Simulation, San Antonio TX February 12-15. Good Luck PVM team, I am looking forward to see more good stuff Dr. Ahmed Ouenes | Petroleum Recovery Research Center | New Mexico Tech | Socoro New Mexico NM 87801 | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tuneyasu Komiya > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? We are using PVM to implement distributed parallel Scheme and Common Lisp. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Up to 45 SPARCstations and a LUNA88K2. -- Tsuneyasu Komiya Toyohashi University of Technology E-Mail: komiya@katura.tutics.tut.ac.jp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Milan Hodoscek > > Are you using PVM today? Yes > > What are your application(s)? Molecular dynamics CHARMM (see http://www.ki.si/parallel.html) > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? HPPA to develop program for CSPP. CSPP is hard to deal with! > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Great library. But I miss some more simplicity: The way CHARMM was parallelized is by using four routines: Get number of nodes Get number of my node send receive So it usually takes few hours to get it run on any parallel platform, but it took me few days to read the whole documentation (which is very well written - I read PVM book - thanx) and copy examples from the book to the program. Sincerely yours -- Milan Hodoscek (http://www.ki.si) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Jeff A. Earickson" > > Are you using PVM today? Only occasionally, as I have to maintain it. > > What are your application(s)? Usually just the pvm examples. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Sun and Paragon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: moyers@mcdgs01.cr.usgs.gov (Jamie Moyers) > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? The USGS is scanning its 1:24000 scale topographic maps at 500 dpi. These maps are then downsampled and georeferenced to a UTM grid. We're using applications built on PVM to perform the georeferencing and browse image generation. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Almost exclusively Data General Aviions. We have over 100 workstations at this site. These are split up into clusters of 10 workstations for the PVM applications. > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. PVM is great! We've been able to develop some very useful systems based on it. Keep doing what you're doing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Limor Schweitzer I'm using, at times dmake which is a parralel make based on pvm. I've given a 3 day course on pvm. Customers of ours are developping air-flow simulation on Dec-APX clusters, using pvm. Hope this helps, and I would appreciate seeing some of the results of your survey. Limor Schweitzer (limor@xpert.com) Xpert Unix Systems LTD. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: vb1890@PLAY.CS.NYU.EDU (Victor Boyko) pvm-survey> Are you using PVM today? Yes. pvm-survey> What are your application(s)? Computer simulation of atomic structure of the high-temperature superconductor Y Ba Cu O. pvm-survey> How many and what kind of machines have you used with pvm-survey> PVM? Usually about five SGI5's. Sometimes SUN4's and RS6K's. -Victor ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Fedor G. Pikus" > > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > > What are your application(s)? Monte-Carlo modeling of stronly interacting many-electron systems (quantum dots, coulomb liquids). > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Cluster of RS6000 with Ethernet and FDDI, Meiko, Paragon. > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Write a working version for Paragon!!! And global operations wpould be nice. -- Fedor G. Pikus 6113 Broida Hall 312 Ellwood Beach Dr. #18 Department of Physics Goleta, California 93117 University of California home phone: (805) 968-3361 Santa Barbara, California 96103 office phone: (805) 893-4072 e-mail: pikus@physics.ucsb.edu FAX : (805) 893-8422 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mark Edwards Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? I am part of team here at NIST involved in the creation of the NIST Parallel Applications Development Environment (PADE). This program employs a graphical user interface under X-windows to allow parallel applications developers using PVM to write complex parallel apps. Programmers can edit/compile/run and debug their PVM applications while staying within the same environment. More info about the PADE can be found on the World-Wide-Web at http://physics.nist.gov/ResOpp/hpcc/pade.html for even more info you can email me (Mark Edwards) at edwards@bruce.nist.gov We are considering a release in early Feb., 1995 -mark edwards ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: panwar@CS.UCLA.EDU (Ramesh Panwar) > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? Medical imaging: wavelet compression, image segmentation, image registration, volumetric image rendering, blood flow modeling etc. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? SUNs for developing test codes. UCLA Medical Center is in the process of purchasing a parallel machine. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sinisa Veseli 1. Yes 2. Solving physics problems. 3. I've been using pvm with F90 on the NEXT machines (25 machines). There were several pvm bugs that I had to fix in order to make it work with F90 compiler. If you are interested, feel free to contact me. S. Veseli ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Rezny > Are you using PVM today? ANSWER: Yes I use pvm extensively. > What are your application(s)? ANSWER: Spatial modelling utilising a client - server approach. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? ANSWER: Workstations : Silicon Graphics ( 2), Sun (>20), DEC Alpha ( 3), Supercomputers : Cray YMP/2D ( 1), YMP/4E ( 1), MPP : Intel Paragon ( 1), IBM SP2 ( 1). regards Mike Rezny ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Chasman > > Are you using PVM today? yes. > > What are your application(s)? a platform independent scalable electronic structure code. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? about 5 > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. A shared counter would be VERY helpful. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Emilio Gallicchio Yes, I'm currently using PVM. My application is Monte Carlo simulation of quantum liquids. I'm using PVM locally on a network of IBM RISC6000 workstations for debugging purposes and remotely on a IBM SP2 machine for production runs (although I plan to implement MPL on this last machine). Emilio Gallicchio Department of Chemistry Columbia University ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: zdenko@harvey.cam.rice.edu (Zdenko Tomasic) >Are you using PVM today? yes. >What are your application(s)? large sparse symmetric matrix diagonalization >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? sun, cray t3d >Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. make sure when vendors claim to have implemented PVM to really implement everything and not just a convenient subset, e.g. t3d pvm fakes a dozen pvm calls returning error and considers pvmfadvise an unsatisfied external. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Xiaoguang Zhang ~{UEO~9b~} > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > > What are your application(s)? First principles calculations as well as small model calculations. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 10 IBM RS/6000 IBM SP2. > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. > Paths for input and output files should be specified at the console or in the hostfile. The current version puts the input and output files in the HOME directory and is very inconvenient. For example, in FORTRAN if unit 8 is written to without an open statement, a file 'fort.8' is created. It is very bad to put this in one's HOME directory. Many programs that are ported from serial versions will have this kind of write statements in them, and it would be helpful to be able to put them in a subdirectory specified by the user. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Anthony Fiarito >Are you using PVM today? YES. >What are your application(s)? POVRAY (Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer) >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 50+ Sun SPARCStations (SunOS 4.1.x & SunOS 5.4) 5 SGI Indy Workstations (Irix 5.2) /\nthony --- Anthony Fiarito alf@ee.pdx.edu Computer Action Team http://www.ee.pdx.edu/~alf Portland State University Chaos. Live it. Learn it. Be it. Project KPSU 1450AM - Least Significant Digit - Saturdays - 11pm to 12a ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Mr. Package" > Are you using PVM today? No. It turned out PVM was overkill for my small project. I plan on using PVM for some other work in the future, however. > What are your application(s)? Visual Recognition; exploring ATM networking. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? HP9000 7xx, between 5 and 15. I hope the survey results are useful, Kelly ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: debra@cs.unr.edu (Debra Estabrook) I am not currently using PVM. I used it in the past on fractals and used DECstations as my machines. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jon A Webb I'm using PVM on an SP2, as the message-passing layer for an HPF-variant compiler (the CMU Fx compiler). -- J ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: symes@masc39.rice.edu (William Symes) > > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > > What are your application(s)? Inverse problems in seismology > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 1) Ethernet connected cluster of IBM RS6K/370s 2) " " " " HP 735s 3) Cray C90 - pvm task distribution on top of autotasking, very effective on dedicated machine > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. > A problem in the past has been the necessity to use independent instrumentation (alog, upshot). xpvm may have taken care of this. will know when we have used it more extensively. Will pass this on to other members of my group for comment. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Susan Feingold 1. We are in the process of installing PVM. 2. Our applications are a mix of engineering and pure science codes. 3. We are currently installing PVM on an SMP 6 processor, shared memory DEC/APX Alpha 7000/660. We might also use it in a heterogeneous mix of Computer Center servers, including two Hyundai Axil 311/5.2's (Sun clones) and two RS/6000's, and of course the DEC Alpha. - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ Susan Feingold D.Sc. ccasuzi@techunix.technion.ac.il Taub Computer Center phone 972-4-293696 Technion, Israel Institute of Technology fax 972-4-236212 Haifa, Israel 32000 - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ - ~~ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Raj Thiagarajan Yes I still use PVM Molecular Dynamics is my application Machines : SGI family mostly ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tal Yonatan hello Project Team, I am pleased to take place in your survey. 1. Yes i am using PVM today (version 3.2). 2. My applications is numerical simulation of turbulent pipe flow and it's post processing. 3. I am using 10 DEC 3000 (ALPHA) work stations in the Dep. of fluid mechanics in tel aviv university. each of my slaves programs is using about 50 Mbytes of memory. please contact me for more information. Jonathan Tal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Nicolas Droux > Are you using PVM today? YES > What are your application(s)? - PPC: Portable Parallel C (http://www.info.isbiel.ch/ppc/) - Parallel library implemented on top of PPC - ECS: External Computation System (an package allowing Mathematical applications (Mathematica, ...) to export numerical intensive calculations to parallel and distributed systems) >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 20 x SPARC 10, Solaris 2.4 3 x NEXTSTEP computers (and soon about 10 Linux machines) Best Regards, Nicolas Droux Engineering School of Biel-Bienne Switzerland ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: lks@ll.mit.edu (Keith Sisterson) Message-Id: <9501081004.AA16649@LL.MIT.EDU> To: pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu Subject: Re: PVM survey PVM Team, We are not using PVM at the moment. We are considering it for a new project which will ultimately require a combination of workstations and perhaps special processor boxes totaling well over 10 GFLOPS peak. The system is for handling large volumes of images and extracting information from them. We will soon be studying whether or not PVM is an appropriate tool for this job, and one question which springs to mind is that of the overhead through the PVM calls. We do have the PVM manual, but I have done little but glance at it yet, so if the answer is there I shall no doubt find it. If there is an e-mail address to which we can send such questions, I would be grateful if you let me know it. Thanks, Keith Sisterson (lks@ll.mit.edu) (617) 981 3465 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: noe@olivia.quim.ucm.es (Noe Garcia Almarza) > > Are you using PVM today? Yes, I am, but I am still an unexperienced beginner > > What are your application(s)? Molecular Dynamics > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? IBM 6000, dec 5000 > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Best wishes, and thanks for producing PVM > The PVM Project Team Noe G. Almarza ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Rene' Kulschewski" > >Are you using PVM today? Yes. > >What are your application(s)? Numerical applications in chemical engineering. > >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 1 Sun running SunOS 4.1.3, 1 Sun running Solaris 2.3, 1 IBM RS 6K with AIX, 1 NeXTstation. > >Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. I would like to see the ability of synchronous communication,e.g. task A get a notification that task B got the message from A (kind of 'blocking send'). It would be nice if one could specify priorities for communication between processes. I mean that i would like to say: message-passing between task A and B is prioritized over communication between B and C. I would find it useful if i could specify that the order between messages send is guaranteed ( following scenario: Task A send's messages to B,C,C,B; it would be nice if not B get his last message before C got his first ...). Regards Rene' --- ____________________________________________________________________________ Rene' Kulschewski ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: nprasad@eos.hitc.com (Narayan S. Prasad) >> >>Are you using PVM today? Yes >> >>What are your application(s)? Scientific >> >>How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? All major workstations like HP, SUN, SGI, IBM. Currently using it on the Cray T3D and IBM SP-2. >> >> >********************************************************* >Michael Bopf Phone:(301)925-0398 >Hughes Applied Information Systems Fax: (301)925-0326 >********************************************************* > > > *********************************************************************** Narayan S. Prasad PH: (301) 925-0467 Dept. SDPS FAX: (301) 925-0327 EOSDIS Core System Hughes Applied Information Systems, Inc. 1616 McCormick Drive Landover, MD 20785 *********************************************************************** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: axon@cortex.rutgers.edu (Ralph Siegel) Are you using PVM today? At the moment I am using PVM3.3. What are your application(s)? Large scale simulations of collections of neurons in the visual cortex. Neural networks. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? A ethernet cluster of 5 Rs/6000 Model 540, 370, 370, 370, powerpc Maui SP/2 50 to 100 nodes at once. -- Sincerely, Ralph Siegel, Ph.D. Assistant Professor axon@cortex.rutgers.edu phone: 201-648-1080 x3261 fax: 201-648-1272 Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Rutgers, The State University 197 University Avenue Newark, NJ 07102 For additional information and reprints use Mosaic: http://www.cmbn.rutgers.edu/cmbn/faculty/rsiegel.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: KARG > > Are you using PVM today? > yes > What are your application(s)? > Parallel FFT, parallel solution of differential equations > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > 4 HP-UX machines 2 models 700 and 2 models 800 Mfg. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | /\ /\ +----------------------------------+ | / \ / \ |\/|ichael | Dipl.-Ing. Michael Karg | | / \/ \ +----------------------------------+ | /\ |/ | 0222/58801/5420 od. 0222/5056190 | | / \ |\arg | karg@uranus.tuwien.ac.at | | /----\ | Graf Starhemberggasse 32/2/3 | |/ \ +---+ 1040 Wien +----+ | http:/uranus.tuwien.ac.at/~karg/karg.html | +-------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: F.A.Rabhi@computer-science.hull.ac.uk (Fethi A Rabhi) > >Are you using PVM today? > Yes. >What are your application(s)? > PVM is used as a target language for high level parallel programming environment. We are also using PVM for some Monte Carlo simulation and molecular dynamics in collaboration with the Applied Physics Department. >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > Network of Sun Sparcs. 8-node i860 based Transtech Paramid. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Fethi A. Rabhi Email : F.A.Rabhi@dcs.hull.ac.uk Computer Science University of Hull Tel : +44 (0)1482 465744 Hull HU6 7RX (UK) Fax : +44 (0)1482 466666 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hiroki Konaka > Are you using PVM today? Yes, I'm using PVM 3.2.6. > What are your application(s)? I'm implementing a parallel object-oriented language, called OCore. I use PVM as the communication infrastructure of the OCore runtime system for NOW's. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Sun SPARC stations. Thanks for your efforts to provide such a good environment. - Hiroki Konaka ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: cxprc@rc.rit.edu (Chris Pane) > > Are you using PVM today? Yes I am > > What are your application(s)? > I am using pvm to implement distributed rendering applications (Raytracing at the moment). This particular project is part of my Master Thesis. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 50 SUN SPARC II 25 SGI5 Machines 4 Pentium (Running Linux) Looking into a Sparc station with Transputers on board (Not sure if this is possible, is it ?????). 2 SPARC 10 machines ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Toshiyuki Takahashi ＞Are you using PVM today? Yes. ＞What are your application(s)? KLIC ＞How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Sun SS10 * 6 IBM RS6000/25T * 6 ---- # Toshiyuki TAKAHASHI # Takeda Lab. # Dept. of Information Science # Science Univ. of Tokyo # E-mail:tosiyuki@is.noda.sut.ac.jp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: rsweet@tiger.denver.colorado.edu (Roland Sweet) I am currently not using PVM although I plan to use it within the next nine months to create a distributed memory parallel version of the software package Crayfishpak. Roland Sweet ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: rory@chemical-eng.edinburgh.ac.uk 1) Yes, I am using PVM today. 2) I have and am using PVM for 2 things: (i) As one means of parallelising a Dynamic Chemical Process Simulator. I previously used Meiko CS-Tools, but wanted to expand out into the use of work station clusters. (ii) As the communication and program management layer for a distributed, object based engineering environment we are developing. PVM is used to manage the machines being used, spawn new object manipulation applications (methods) and to pass ascii encoded objects between them. It is a Client/Server based environment were applications are continually being dynamically spawed and killed. We also have applications joining sessions without ever being spawned within PVM. 3) So far we have used SUN4s, a LINUX box and IBM RS6000s. I have also tried to use a SEQUENT running DYNIX/ptx(R) V2.1.1 but could not get it to compile. The functions gettimeofday() and ffs() were not available or no BSD compatibility library appears to exist for this OS. On System V machines the function get_clock seems to be the alternative to gettimeofday(). Unfortunately there is no allowance in the PVM source for easily substituting gettimeofday as there is for other functions such as bcopy() for example. Comments: --------- Overall, I think PVM is an excellent package. My main complaints are as follows. (i) Output management: I really hate the way output is managed. You either have to tail -f a /tmp file which usually hangs when too much output appears or you have to manage all of the output youself in an application you have specified wants it using the pvm_setopt function. The second of these is fine in principle. It would however be a nice touch to add an option which tells PVM to manage the incoming redirected output for the programmer. i.e. Whenever PVM gets a message which is an output redirect is simply dumps it to stdout/stderr rather than expecting the programmer to deal with it. (ii) pvm_kill() One of our projects uses PVM to spawn and manage many applications. Part of this management process is to kill application which have hung or are nolonger wanted. It is not always possible to send a shutdown message, and quite often we have to use pvm_kill(). The problem is that pvm_kill() only sends a SIGTERM, which some applications ignore. I would like to see pvm_kill() extended to allow SIGKILL as well as SIGTERM, which is guaranteed to kill the application. In fact, could pvm_kill() not be expanded to behave in the same manner as the unix kill(), thus allowing a multitude of signals to be sent to distributed applications. At the moment we have to log into the machine and kill the application via a shell which is inconvenient and outwith the applications control. (iii) PVM to PVM connection. PVM only allows applications which belong to a single user to communicate. It would be a usefull extension to allow one users PVM to log in to and send messages to another users PVM. In our design application each user works under a client/server environment. However we want each user to be able to use other users object data bases and applications. To do this we need to connect the servers together. At present we are having to use sockets since PVM does not support inter PVM communication at present. Hope all this helps Rory. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Oren Laden Hi, PVM survey >>Are you using PVM today? Yes. >>What are your application(s)? We are using PVM as a reference execution environment to test our dynamic load-balancing mechanisms. Specific issues include load distribution and redistribution, high utilization of a NOW configuration, and communication overhead. We are also running parallel numerical applications. >>How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? A cluster of Pentiums, 486/66 and 486/33 PC's. >>Any comments and suggestions for improvement ... The current work and load distribution of PVM should be improved. We executed PVM on top of MOSIX (our NOW OS) and observed an improvement of 25-150% in the execution times of several parallel applications. These results are expected to be even worse in a multiuser usage. Bye, Oren. **************************************** ** Oren Laden (orenl@cs.huji.ac.il) ** ** ---------------------------------- ** ** Distributed Operating Systems lab. ** ** The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ** ** Jerusalem, Israel 91904 ** **************************************** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: christian.leder@stud.uni-rostock.de (Christian Leder) > > Are you using PVM today? no, not today but on a regular basis approx. 2 times per month > What are your application(s)? numerical computations, simulations, work on my thesis > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? SUN cluster, RS6000 cluster, LINUX PC cluster ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Carlos Armando Magalhaes Duarte > > Are you using PVM today? > Yes! > What are your application(s)? > Parallel implementation of hp Finite element Methods. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > It is been developed on a cluster of 16 RS6000 (many models). > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Keep up with the good work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Paul Hayes" > > Are you using PVM today? Not at this moment, but I plan to. > > What are your application(s)? Large memory matrices. Sets of large memory matrices. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Sun, HP, alpha. > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. > More example programs would be nice. Perhaps the fellows who developed lparx could get some good programs/utilities for you. -- Paul Hayes Special Purpose Processor Development Group Phone:(507) 284 3479 Mayo Foundation Fax:(507) 284 9171 Guggenheim 1012B Email:hayes.paul@mayo.edu 200 First Street SW Rochester, MN 55905 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Julian Hall > Are you using PVM today? > Yes > What are your application(s)? > Parallel revised simplex method for linear programming. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > Local network of SUN workstations and the Edinburgh Cray T3D. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: rainer@parchaos.mathematik.uni-freiburg.de (Rainer Kleinrensing) Hello there, > Are you using PVM today? Yes, we use it on our 14 SGI Indigo Workstations and on a Sun Sparcstation Pool. > What are your application(s)? We are doing CFD and have ported some code to a transputer machine (Parsytec Xplorer, NOT using PVM). We want to be able to port it to a variety of machines, so we consider changing it to use PVM. There is a commercial implementation of PVM on the Parsytec machine, but we did not use this one yet. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM Only the SGIs and Suns mentioned, but we'll try it on the Parsytec machine soon. It's a nice piece of software, thanks a lot ! -- Rainer Kleinrensing, rainer@mathematik.uni-freiburg.de Institute for Applied Mathematics Phone: +49-761-203-5639 Hermann-Herder-Str. 10 Freiburg University Fax: +49-761-203-5632 79104 Freiburg / Brsg., Germany ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: louis@ford.ee.up.ac.za (Louis Coetzee) To: pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu Subject: Re: PVM survey >>>>> On Fri, 6 Jan 1995 18:08:47 -0500, pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu said: PVM> Are you using PVM today? No, not today, although I use it very often. PVM> What are your application(s)? Parallel training of neural networks as well as a variety of parallel optimization algorithms. PVM> How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 12 IBM RS6000 machines or 1 4 processor SUN sparcserver 1000 PVM> Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. I would really appreciate a shared memory port for the KSR1. Cheers Louis Coetzee louis@ford.ee.up.ac.za ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ralf Hetzel Q11: I am not using PVM at the moment. Q2: Quantum Monte Carlo simulations in theoretical solid state physics Q3: About 12 HP workstations, 700 series, running HP-UX 8.07 Best regards, Ralf Hetzel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: tom (Thomas Heiling) > > Are you using PVM today? Yes > > What are your application(s)? A parallel chess program > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? My main machines are 386 or 486 PC with varying Speed and equipment. Normally the program plays on 386/25 MHZ 4 MB RAM 386/40 MHZ 8 MB RAM 486/33 MHZ 16 MB RAM 486/66 MHZ 8 MB RAM and eventually on some HP Workstations for testing purpose. ( HP9000/ 715 ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: atwood@nas.nasa.gov (Christopher A. Atwood) > > Are you using PVM today? y > > What are your application(s)? computational fluids, nonlinear dynamics, controls > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? v3.2.3: 19 nodes, w/ machine composed of: sgi (mips r3000, r4000,r4400), hp755 (pa-risc), ibm590 (rios) pvme on ibm sp2 to 31 nodes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Karl.F.Moschner@urlus.sprint.com About a year ago we downloaded a copy of PVM and successfully tested it but did not move ahead with implementing critical applications under PVM. It was attractive but a few factors kept us from pursuing PVM: - we are low on manpower - commercial applications offered greater speedups on a single workstations than we would have attained by implementing comparable available codes under PVM - we purchased a parallel server which supported all of our software without PVM and offered greater performance than all of our workstations combined We have encouraged suppliers to offer PVM variants but have had no success. One particular commercial vendor plans to offer coarse grained network parallelism (automatically submit a series of jobs or readily discernable subprocesses across a series of identified accounts/systems). Karl F. Moschner Karl.F.Moschner@urlus.sprint.com Unilever Research U. S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Chitalia 1) Are you using PVM today? No, but I plan to use it when I implement my algorithm. 2) What are your application(s)? Parallel graphics algorithms. Mainly geometric modelling. 3) How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I've used a network of Sun workstations (up to 10 different ones) and an Intel iPSC/2 with 4 and 16 nodes. Since I haven't actually programmed with PVM yet, I can't offer any suggestions. I've only tried out the test examples. Sorry about that. JC chitalia@pixel.csee.usf.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mike Kupferschmid > Are you using PVM today? Not this precise day, but I have a graduate student who is using it from time to time these days. > What are your application(s)? He's trying to use parallel function evaluations to speed up a nonlinear optimization algorithm. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? We've been running on a 16-node IBM SP1, whose nodes are RS6000/360 workstations. > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. We have been hindered in our attempts to devise an effective parallel algorithm by the fact that PVM does not provide a primitive for asynchronously interrupting a worker process and causing it to start over again as though it had been killed and respawned. Instead we must either kill and respawn the process (which has a very high overhead indeed) or poll within the worker (which is inconvenient and also wastes time). There should be a way within the worker to set a program interrupt exit: "whenever you get this signal from the master program, stop whatever it is you are doing and go back to statement n". And there should be a way within the master to send the signal that says "abandon that calculation and get ready for a new assignment". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: zliu@tiger.denver.colorado.edu (Zhining Liu) Are you using PVM today? Yes, but not very much What are your application(s)? CFD and numerical combustion How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? IBM-SP2 Zhining Liu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: MAVERICK Are you using PVM today? Yes. What are your application(s)? Scientific data (images and times series) analysis/processing. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 6 Decstations. adios Ata <(|)>. | Mail Dr Ata Etemadi, Blackett Laboratory, | | Space and Atmospheric Physics Group, | | Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine, | | Janet atae@uk.ac.ic.ph.spva Earn/Bitnet atae@spva.ph.ic.ac.uk | | Internet/Arpanet atae%spva.ph.ic.ac.uk Span SPVA::atae | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ed_Donley Response to PVM Survey 1. Are you using PVM today? I am using PVM to teach an undergraduate course on Numerical Methods for Supercomputers. The title is now a misnomer, since I am using PVM in addition to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Cray YPM C90. 2. What are your application(s)? The students are using the Lennard-Jones model (a system of ordinary differential equations) for molecular dynamics modelling. This unit is based on Lloyd Fosdick's and Liz Jessup's High Performance Scientific Computing course materials at the University of Colorado. 3. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Six DECstation 5000s running Ultrix 4.4. Ed Donley Mathematics Department Indiana University of PA Indiana, PA 15705 U.S.A. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: --> --> Are you using PVM today? Yes, but only just started. --> --> What are your application(s)? Distributed process support --> --> How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Currently 5 SUN4 (SunOS 4.1.3) machines -- Stewart Brodie Dept. Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University, UK. http://louis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/‾snb94r/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Are you using PVM today? Yes. What are your application(s)? Large-scale parallel simulation of models in statistical mechanics. How many and what kinds of machines have you used with PVM? Clarkson University RISC/6000 cluster: approx. 70 IBM RISC/6000 workstations. SUN Workstations at Los Alamos National Laboratory: approx. 20 SPARCstations. Suggestions for improvement: It would be very, very nice to be able to transfer "unsigned" variables between processes (i.e. in C, unsigned long, unsigned int, etc...). In the version of PVM I have now, it is only possible to transfer signed long's and int's. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Himavan P 1. Yes, I am using PVM. 2. Application: Finite Element Analysis, Stiffness Matrix Generation & Assemblage. 3. How many machines/what kind: 2 to 4 machines, Sparc Stations SUN. x. Thank you, Himavan Pamujula ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sameer Suresh Shende > > Are you using PVM today? No. I am a CS grad student and I was using it last term for course projects. > > What are your application(s)? > Expanding the PVM API. Writing system software. I am not an application developer. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? About 6 SUN4 workstations (SunOS) and a Sequent Symmetry machine (Dynix). > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. I was working on a dynamic load balancing API for PVM. PVM currently provides point to point communication constructs for communication (or multicast). The sender iss aware of who is going to receive the message. I developed an API based on heirarchical farms where the farmer task makes a number of woprk packets and sends it to a central server. The workers group themselves into process worker classes (multiple farms per application, multiple worker classes per farm, multiple worker tasks (pvm tasks) per worker class, worker can in turn be a farmer - heirarchical farm, and dynamic worker task migration from one farm to another) and receive work packets only when they request for one. This way, the workers on slow nodes get fewer work packets and the application is load balanced. If you want the report of my project, I will be glad to give it to you. My address is sameer@cs.uoregon.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Steve Moyer >Are you using PVM today? Yes. >What are your application(s)? I am using PVM as a communications and process management substrate for parallel-distributed file system research (PIOUS). >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 1) Sun4/SunOS 4.1.3 2) Sun4/SunOS 5.3 3) SGI/IRIX 4.0.5 4) Dec Alpha/OSF1 2.1 5) HP 9000/HP-UX 6) IBM RS6000/AIX >Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Two suggestions: 1) I would like to see the bug fixed that prevents pvm_pkbyte()/pvm_upkbyte() pairs from being able to pack/unpack in different groupings; eg 6 calls to pvm_pkbyte() packing one byte each and 2 calls to pvm_upkbyte() unpacking 3 bytes each. This works in the data raw mode but not in the data default mode. Since this can be done with all other types, it should be made to function properly with the byte type. I have reported this before, but was told that this is considered a feature and not a bug. 2) Message contexts for library development would be a BIG improvement. Regards, Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steven A. Moyer Email: moyer@mathcs.emory.edu Mathematics and Computer Science Office: (404) 727-0668 Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 Fax: (404) 727-5611 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: kly@sunpaw.cern.ch (Gregory KOZLOVSKY) >>Are you using PVM today? No, I finished a program which uses PVM and this program will hopefully be used by other people. >>How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I used PVM on SP-1 and SP-2. >>Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. I would like to see better debugging facilities. There should be a way of getting the output from different host on your terminal (prefixed with host id) and not into a file only as it is now. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: bbs@bbsipc.newcastle.edu.au (Bryan Beresford-Smith) Are you using PVM today? I used it for some of the practical work last year in a course I taught on Parallel Processing. What are your application(s)? So far, only as a tool for teaching and research. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? About 20 SUN workstations and also with a MasPar MP-1. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. It has been very useful as a teaching tool. Thanks! ****************************************************************************** Dr Bryan Beresford-Smith Senior Lecturer .-_|¥ Dept of Computer Science email: bbs@cs.newcastle.edu.au / ¥ The University of Newcastle ph. + 61 49 216056 ¥.--._* <- Callaghan NSW 2308 fax + 61 49 216929 v Australia ****************************************************************************** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: nhan@tiny.me.su.oz.au (Nhan Phan-Thien) > Are you using PVM today ... Yes, we are planning to expand our PVM farm > What are the applications ... Our applications are in the areas of Stokes flow and elasticity using boundary element methods. Mainly the operator is deflated and an iterative technique is used to obtain the solution. The system matrix is not stored but calculated as needed. A sub-domain decomposition is used, mapping each sub-domain to each processor. Extension of the finive volume method to PVM is being planned. > How many machines ... We're using 3 DEC alpha 300 1 DEC alpha 400 3 DEC alpha 800 2 Titan Ardent Ref: N Phan-Thien & D.L. Tullock, ``Completed Double Layer BEM in Elasticity and Stokes Flow: Distributed Computing Through PVM'', Computational Mechanics, 14 (1994) 370--383. Nhan Phan-Thien Professor in Mechanical Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: lange@cis.ksu.edu (Gregory Lange) > > Are you using PVM today? YES! > > What are your application(s)? > Running a monte carlo simulation involving turbulent flow fields. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > 5 Sparc10's an am now running on the NCSA power challenge. -- Gregory Lange lange@cis.ksu.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Paul Crivelli > Are you using PVM today? Yes, I have been since around November. > What are your application(s)? I have parabolized a Fluid Mechanics program (originally written by someone else). I am comparing their in-house message passing protocol to PVM. Sorry but I cant give you any more info than that. Confidentiality and all that dont ya know. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? All DEC machines. Predominantly Alphas (2-4) but also a few of their older machines (1-2). The documentation helped me a great deal. Especially the Appendix covering all the different commands, this was invaluable. The quick reference card helped alot too. Congratulations on a job well done. Im a Mechanical Engineer and I didnt have a lot of problems with learning PVM. Paul Crivelli ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jason Moore > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > > What are your application(s)? Mainly research. Parallel I/O, getting parameters for models. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Usually no more than 8 machines: HPPA, SUN4 and Meiko CS-2 using their modified version of PVM as well as the daemon-based generic version ------- Jason Moore Internet: moorej@research.cs.orst.edu Department of Computer Science Oregon State University Bell-net: (503) 737-4052 "Anything worth doing is worth doing with a smile" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: bneta@math.nps.navy.mil (Beny Neta) Sirs Yes I am using PVM currently on a network of sun workstations (up to 16 machines). Application: Orbit Prediction. Beny Neta ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Prachya Chalermwat > > Are you using PVM today? YES. > > What are your application(s)? NOT YET DECIDED BUT TEND TO BE IMAGE PROCESSING, MATRIX COMPUTATION. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 2 Linux-based 486 machines 1 Sparc 1000 server 2 Sun servers 2 Sun workstations 1 Sun Sparc workstation > -- PC =-------------------------------+-----------------------------------= Prachya Chalermwat | "I've tried everything. email: prachya@seas.gwu.edu | I've not failed. [O] (202) 994-5268 | I've just found 10,000 ways [Fax] (202) 994-5296 | that won't work." | Thomas A. Edison =-------------------------------+-----------------------------------= ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: cstokley@cs.gmu.edu (Katja Stokley) Are you using PVM today? Not specifically today (it's Sunday :-)), but yes, I'm using PVM now. What are your application(s)? Simulating an interconnection network for a massively parallel computer in order to implement algorithms for the simulated machines. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Sparc workstations, up to about 20 of them. Sincerely, Katja Stokley cstokley@cs.gmu.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jonathan Kua > > Are you using PVM today? > Yes. > What are your application(s)? We were trying to do execution time prediction on-the-fly so as to be able to schedule a parallelizable program as efficiently as possible. We concentrated on medium-grain parallelism. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > HP 715s Sun Sparc 10s IBM RS/6000 We have only used heterogeneous combinations of up till 20 machines recently. We might try more later. Jonathan Kua kua@crhc.uiuc.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: tsune@taklab.takenaka.co.jp (TSUNEKAWA Hiroshi) Dear Sir: pvm-survey>Are you using PVM today? Yes pvm-survey>What are your application(s)? I'm using PVM to parallelize EDEM: Extended Distinct Element Method that is based on Cundall's DEM and that have beed developed by Prof. Hakuno. It is a method to analyze both discrete and continuous material. pvm-survey>How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I usually use two or three SGI machines. Indigo2(IRIX5) CRIMSON(IRIX5...recently changed...I haven't excuted PVM yet) 310VGX(IRIX4) EDEM needs more traffic data than FEM. I'm trying to reduce the data to accelerate the execution. sincerely yours. ----- TSUNEKAWA Hiroshi Fundamental Research Department TAKENAKA Research & Development Institute, Chiba, Japan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: roberto@ee.uwa.edu.au (Roberto Togneri) > > Are you using PVM today? Not exactly today, but we have been using it off and on and it will be used for parallelising some algorithms we have on workstation clusters. There is currently a vacation student learning PVM with the intent to use it for something before the summer is out (see below). > > What are your application(s)? We have used PVM as a vehcile for a load sharing program we developed and I am still hoping we can incorporate it as part of PVM. Currently we are looking at using it to parallelise the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm used in our work. It is a prime candidate due to its computational and memory requirements. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? So far just Suns (SPARC II, ELCs) running SunOS 4.1.3. We have a two-processor SGI Onyx and if a native message-passing version of PVM is available (I haven't checked the latest version yet) it may used to explore/exploit the SGI. > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. I have a project looking at the various ways and means of communicating using the TCP protocols directly to examine the most effective communication standard for parallel algorithms (e.g connectionless UDP .vs. connectioned streams). One problem I found with PVM was that its internal buffering meant that if I wanted to transer X Mb of data I would need to have 2X Mb of memory. I haven't yet tested the latest version which allows user control of buffer management. On the otherhand for most parallel algorithms there are many small-data (< 1024 kb) communications and a way to optimally handle this would be useful (this is what the above project is going to try and figure out). If you would like further clarification or have suggestions please do not hesitate to contact me. I am definitely interested in the area of parallel computation over networked computers. Regards, -- Dr. Roberto Togneri Phone: +61-9-380-2535 _--_|¥ Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems / ¥ Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering *_.--._/ The University of Western Australia Fax: +61-9-380-1101 v NEDLANDS WA 6907 Australia Email: roberto@ee.uwa.edu.au ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: sato@mt.cssi.co.jp (Ryuuichi Sato) Please receive my answers for your three questions. 1. Yes, I am using PVM now. 2. My application is Fluid Flow Analysis / FDM. 3. The machines I use are two or four SUN4s. I hope these help you. Best regards, Ryuichi SATO, Canon Supercomputing S.I., Osaka JAPAN, e-mail: sato@cssi.co.jp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Here's my answer, >> Are you using PVM today? >> Yes. >> What are your application(s)? >> CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics). >> How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? >> approximately four to ten of networked IBM's RS6000. I'm considering of using a workstation cluster of 16 nodes in the future. Regards. Takashi Ohta at ohtak@trl.ibm.co.jp -------------------------------------------- Tokyo Research Laboratory / IBM Japan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hiroshi NAKASHIMA > Are you using PVM today? Well, although I'm not sure whether I'll use PVM today, I and my coleagues are using it almost daily. > What are your application(s)? Implementation of a concurrent logic programming language. PVM is the inter-processor communication kernel of the run-time system of the language processor. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Two. Fujitsu AP1000, a message-passing-base distributed-memory multicomputer, and SunSparc workstations connected by LAN. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hiroshi Nakashima (nakasima@kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp) Dept. of Information Science, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto Univ. Yoshida Hon-Machi, Sakyo-Ku, Kyoto, 606-01 Japan. +75-753-5383 information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. I might ask you to add a configuration for EWS4800s in the next distribution. I will send you one when I confirm that the test suite runs well. Best regards, Koichi Konishi Computer System Lab., C&C Labs. NEC Corporation Phone: +81-44-856-8488, FAX: +81-44-856-2231 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: zhang hao > Are you using PVM today? Yes, we use it. > What are your application(s)? We use it to do some research about WS. Cluster. And to present a platform such that the user of our MPP machine can run their Applications on it. They do have a lot of Apps. :-) > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I haven't use a lot of nodes to run PVM. But I did have run it on a lot kind of platforms, includes: SUN4, RS6K, MIPS, E88K, Motorola S-900 and Mach 2.6 running on PC 386. Hope that helps to improve PVM --Zhang Hao NCIC, China. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: hideaki@hydra.cray.com (Hideaki Moriyama) > > Are you using PVM today? > NOT today. Once a month, maybe. > What are your application(s)? > I don't have real applications. Just play with it. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > Cray (Vector, MPP and CS6400) DEC 10000 IBM 590 Sun (Solaris 1 and 2) HP SGI > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. > compatibility between versions ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: pplab@myrinae.hallym.ac.kr (Project PVM) Hi, Thanks for your efforts. 1.Yes, I am using PVM today. 2.Parallel numerical processing & Program analysis 3. 8 (SUN3, SUN4) Have a nice day (-| jkjang@sun.hallym.ac.kr pplab@maple.hallym.ac.kr ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Suresh Hungenahally Hi I am using PVM extensively for teaching and research. I use it to teach in the Advanced Computer Systems Course at the Honours level in my School and ususlly I get 22 to 24 post graduate students in this subject. I also use it for applied projects in Signal processing and other algorithmic work. In fact I am finding it very hard to process the data i am getting just due to mere volume. I would appreciate if any one can collaborate with me to get the reports converted into journal papers. I am willing to offer the source code and the co-authorship. At present I have 14 technical reports sitting on my desk all of them are work using PVM on 8 machines. reg. suresh _______________________________________________________________________________ Suresh Hungenahally suresh@tomahawk.sct.gu.edu.au Signal Processing and Intelligent Systems Research Group, School of Microelectronic Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, Griffith University, Nathan Qld 4111 Australia Ph +61 7 875 5063 Fax +61 7 875 5198 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Sitsky > Are you using PVM today? Yes - although most of my programs are now being written in MPI. > > What are your application(s)? General Relativistic ray tracer. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Development under a SUN farm, runs on the Fujitsu AP1000 machine at the ANU and CM5 machines at the ANU, university of New South Wales and University of Adelaide. A run was done combining the three CM5s and the AP1000. David Sitsky Email: sits@cs.anu.edu.au CAP Research Program Phone: +61 6 249 5143 Australian National University Fax: +61 6 249 0010 Canberra ACT 0200, Australia WWW: ftp://dcssoft.anu.edu.au/pub/www/dcs/people/sitd/sits.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Craig Huckabee > > Are you using PVM today? No, not as of yet. I have not used it since school (See Question #3) but I'd hope to find a use for it at my new job. > What are your application(s)? > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I used PVM as a senior at Clemson University for a class project. We were assigned the task of using PVM to do a distributed merge-sort between 5 or more machines (simple task, but it was used to demonstrate process control and communication for the class which was about Operating Systems) I had been a cooperative education student with Naval Electronic Systems Engineering Center, (NAVELEX), Charleston - a DOD/Navy command, and had access to several Sun machines that were distributed across the US. I used PVM to do my merge sort between 5 machines, each being in a different city in the US. Each machine was an identical Sun SPARC 10/41 and the links were T1 and ethernet. I got a 'A' for the effort and I found PVM to be easy to use and well documented. I guess I should kinda say Thanks! > Regards, Craig Huckabee NAVELEX Charleston, SC huck@nosc.mil ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: chik@icot.or.jp (Takashi Chikayama) Hideaki Moriyama (hideaki@hydra.cray.com) forwarded me your message calling for feedback on PVM. Here's mine. Are you using PVM today? Yes. What are your application(s)? In an implementation of a parallel logic programming language called KLIC (available by anonymous ftp from ftp.icot.or.jp). There are several other (more efficient) implementations dependent on platforms, but the PVM version is meant to be portable. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? - SparcCenter 2000 (20 processors) - DEC AXP-7000 (6 processors) - SparcStation 10/52 systems, connected with ethernet (8 systems with 16 processors in total) Comments: To build a symbolic processing system for dynamic and irregular computation, it is desirable to asynchronously interrupt other processes to stop or suspend speculative computation and start computation newly known to be mandatory. We use sendsig for the purpose, but sendsig sometimes outstrips ordinary messages, which is a problem because the receiver may receive no messages after receiving the signal. Our implemetation currently use timer-driven polling in combination to make it up, but it is an awkward solution. It would be much better if PVM could provide some feature that guarantees that the signal arrives *after* specified messages (though I'm not sure whether it can be implemented in a portable manner or not). Takashi Chikayama Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (aka ICOT) Tokyo, Japan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Wang Dao-liu" I am learning to use PVM now and plan to apply it to Molecular Dynamics. Now we have installed PVM on 8 SGI indigo R4000 connected in a local network and some i486s, which are used for simulation in single machine. We have found PVM is quite good environment for network computation. Many thanks for your supporting PVM. Best regards, Daoliu Wang ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Shinji Hioki >> >> Are you using PVM today? >> Yes, but only test for production. >> What are your application(s)? >> Elementary Particle Physics Lattice Quantum Chromo Dynamics Monte Carlo Simulation >> How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? >> 4 DEC ALPHA S.Hioki Dept. of Physics, Hiroshima Univ., Higashi-Hiroshima 724, JAPAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: sjchen@pine.iecs.fcu.edu.tw (Shih-Jeh Chen) Dear pvm_survey: Thank you for giving the important message. I am using PVM today! My applications are parallel processing research, and MPI standard implementation. I use four or eight SUN-workstations(SPARC classic) for PVM applications. I need the informations about PVM and MPI, if you have the lastest message, please mail to me. Thank you very much! email: sjchen@pine.iecs.fcu.edu.tw Name : Shih-Jey Chen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From : Feng-Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan. > >Are you using PVM today? No, not today. I used it a year ago and I will probably use PVM again in a few months. >What are your application(s)? Experimental meso-scale wind model. >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 1 x HP735/99 1 x HP715/50 1 x HP705 1 x SPARC 2 1 x SPARC ELC 2 x SPARC 1 1 x SPARC SLC Regards, Peter McGavin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: lally@lanl.gov (Bryan Lally) > >Are you using PVM today? No. I hope to be soon. My codes are almost ready for this step. >What are your application(s)? CFD, always coupled with some other transport phenomena (heat transfer, electromagnetics, particulate flow, etc.) and often with chemcial reactions layered on top of the fluid mechanics). >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? None, but hope to use a heterogeneous cluster of SGI and DEC AXP workstations. - Bryan -------------- Bryan Lally lally@lanl.gov ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tony von Sadovszky Are you using PVM today? Yes Iam using PVM today.... What are your application(s)? My applications include the following: - particle in cell plasma modeling - genetic algorithms applied to ground water modeling, eclipsing binary star modeling, and electron scattering resonance calculations How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? The machines upon which I utilize PVM include: - 23 DECstation 3100's - 4 HP 9000/725's - IBM SP2 @ Muai - CRAY T3D @ Anchorage -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tony von Sadovszky Email: tony@rigel.physics.unr.edu University of Nevada, Reno Office (LP 314): (702) 784 - 6059 Department of Physics/220 Department: (702) 784 - 6792 Reno, Nevada 89557-0058 Fax: (702) 784 - 1398 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: muramatu@cx_nkkc34.info-sys.tokyo.nkk.co.jp (muramatu) Dear the person in charge, This is Muramatsu at NKK Co., Japan. In reply to the message from you. >Are you using PVM today? No. I used to use PVM. >What are your application(s)? An ab initio Molecular Orbital Method programme. >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? On CONVEX C34, HP9000 4cpu cluster. Sorry that I cannot do much help. I moved to TCGMSG because the programme I'm using was revised to fit TCGMSG. I think PVM is much more polular than TCGMSG, and is the de fact standard. Besides this, in the field of chemistry, TCGMSG has something. Regards, -------------------------------------------------------- Yukihisa Muramatsu: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: nomura@exp.cl.nec.co.jp >Are you using PVM today? Yes, I am. >What are your application(s)? Kinds of basic utilities for computer simulations. >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I using NEC EWS4800 workstation claster: usually 6 to 10. >Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. >Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. I wish to use "numerial recipes for C++ using PVM"!! ********************************************************** Masahide Nomura (nomura@exp.cl.nec.co.jp) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mansha@research.trddc.ernet.in (Rajesh K. Mansharamani) Are you using PVM today? Yes What are your application(s)? CFD, Sintering (Engineering simulations) How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? SUN Sparc II, SUN3, RS6K, I386, I486 (ATT SYS V and LINUX), HP9000/720, HP9000/435 Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. PVM is extremely portable and reasonably efficient. We wish the packing calls could be automated. For example, have a parser that parses a function call such as pvm_send(tid, tag, arg1, arg2, ...) where arg1, arg2 can be of different types (e.g, complex structures) and by determining the types of the arguments it generates pack calls. This could be a preprocessor to C compilation. Also if something can be provided under PVM for the advanced system programmer who might want to use various socket options (such as select etc.) it will be useful. Rajesh K. Mansharamani TRDDC Email: mansha@trddc.ernet.in 1 Mangaldas Road Phone: (212) 622 809 Pune 411 001 Fax: (212) 623 713 India ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: pefv774@hpcf.cc.utexas.edu (Taskin Ucpinar) Here are the answers to your questions. > > Are you using PVM today? > Yes, very extensivelly. > > What are your application(s)? > My program is the extension to the utchem code of the program that is developped by the University of Texas @ Austin. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > The program has been run under a heterogeneous network of work stations of a total of 12 machines. The network consists of DEC-ALPHA, IBM-RS6000 and IBM-PowerPC computers. On the other hand, a modified version of the same program runs under Cray-T3D. > > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > I wish it was a little bit faster on a heterogenous network. For comparison a version of utchem runs under c-linda system. And that version is faster than the pvm version. I know that the information that I gave is not detailed. If you need more information please do not hesitate to contact. Taskin Ucpinar University of Texas @ Austin Petroleum and Geosystem Eng. Dept. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: tchen@elbert.Mines.Colorado.EDU (Tong Chen) Are you using PVM today? Yes. What are your application(s)? Imaging the earth's subsurface structure for oil and gas exploration. How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I've used about 20 IBM RS6000 and 10 NeXT workstations, mainly for experiment. Normally, I only use less than 10 IBM RS6000. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: naiman@super.org (Aaron E. Naiman) Hi. Although I am not currently using PVM, I hope to use it in the future. In the past I have set it up, and used it (slightly) for a CM-5. Thank you. -- Aaron Naiman | IDA/SRC | University of Maryland, Dept. of Mathematics | naiman@super.org | naiman@math.umd.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: scott stanley > > Are you using PVM today? I am not currently using PVM very much. However, I will be using it in the future. I am working with a vector code and will be using PVM later to help develop a parallel version of the code. > > What are your application(s)? My applications are in the area of computational fluid dynamics (both direct numerical simulation and large eddy simulation of turbulent flows.) > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 12 HP 9000 series workstations ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Eddie Johnson Hello, I am not currently using PVM today, but I did use it in a class on parallel computing. We used PVM on 15 Sun Stations to implement a matrix multiplication routine and a prime number generator. The PVM platform ran very well, and I was quite impressed. One thing I noticed was that entering a large number of machines from the PVM command prompt to form a conference was sometimes cumbersome, and I wish there was a faster method of handling this. I wrote my own code to add machines to the conference, but it would be nice if this code was already in place, possibly in the form of reading a text file of host names and adding them to the conference? Just an idea... I would like to congratulate you on the design of such as amazing platform. Keep up the good work! Eddie Johnson -- __^__ __^__ ( _____ )-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-( _____ ) | | | | | | | | | | Eddie Johnson | | | | Undergraduate, Computer Science | | | | The University of North Carolina at Greensboro | | | | E-mail : johnsone@hamlet.uncg.edu | | | | | | | ___ | | ___ | ( _____ )-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-( _____ ) V V ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? I have a program, Surface Evolver, that is an interactive program for modelling liquid surfaces. I have experimented with making a parallel version with PVM, and I plan more extensive experiments this spring. Also, next year I will be teaching a course on parallel programming, and I am thinking of using PVM there. Do you know of any course materials based on PVM? > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? SGI, Sun, NeXT, both solo and network of 10-15 mixed types. Also a little on a CM5. And solo on an Intel machine. Ken Brakke brakke@geom.umn.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: loebel@ZIB-Berlin.DE (Andreas Loebel) Dear PVM Project Team, thank you for your interest in my current work, >Are you using PVM today? > yes I do, at this time I have installed pvm 3.3.5 >What are your application(s)? > We delevop a distributed branch&cut program for vehicle scheduling in urban public mass transit. The distribution on serveral workstations is possible and necessary because we are interested in solving a kind of multi-commodity-flow problem with up to 30 million variables. The communication with pvm is not very extensive. >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > At this time we use a cluster of SUN workstations (sparc20, sparc10, sparc5). The operation system is solaris 2.3. >Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. >Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. > For us pvm is ok. The only problem we sometimes have is adding pvm daemons from the pvm console. Best wishes, -- Andreas Loebel Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fuer Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB) Heilbronner Str. 10, D-10711 Berlin (Wilmersdorf) PHONE: +49 30 / 89604-239 EMAIL: loebel@zib-berlin.de ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: hilka@em2c.ecp.fr (Martin Hilka) 1/ Yes, We are still using PVM 2/ Our Applications are principally Direct Numerical Simulation of Reactive Flow (turbulent premixed and diffusion flames). - CFD in a wider sense. 3/ Machines used are Sun (Sparc10), SGI and RS6000 clusters, T3D, CS2, CM-5, Paragon, SP-1/SP-2 and VPP-500. For production runs we target Workstation clusters, T3D and VPP-500, perhaps SP-2. Thanks to you all. Martin Hilka ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Thomas Frank > Are you using PVM today? Yes ! > What are your application(s)? CFD - Computational Fluid Dynamics, Multiphase Flows > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 3 machines HP 735/755 , MIMD parallel Computer Parsytec GC with up to 128 Motorola Power PC Chips > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. It would be fine to have in PVM the same mechanism for message induced processes like in EXPRESS. In EXPRESS it is possible to define a special category of messages. If such a message is send to a curtain processor, a user-defined process is initiated. In that user-defined procedure it is possible to send further messages (normal and special type messages). So you can submitt results of that procedure call to the initiating processor. That kind of special messages gives you a convenient tool for programming of - for instance - memory managers for large amounts of distributed data. Sincerely yours, Thomas Frank ******************************************************************************* * Dr. Thomas Frank | * * Technical University Chemnitz-Zwickau | Adress of the Institute : * * Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and | * * Process Technology | * * Department of Multiphase Flow | Reichenhainer Strasze 88 * * PSF 964 , 09009 Chemnitz | 09126 Chemnitz * * Germany | Germany * *-----------------------------------------------------------------------------* * Tel.: +49 (371) 531 46 43 * * Fax.: +49 (371) 531 46 44 email : Frank@IMech.TU-Chemnitz.DE * * URL : http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/‾fth/mpf/mpf_home.html * ******************************************************************************* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jleik@statoil.no (Joergen Leiknes) > >Are you using PVM today? Yes > >What are your application(s)? ECLIPSE, a reservoir simulation program. > >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Approx. 10 machines, IBM-rs6000, HP-hppa, SGI and sun4. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Dr. Manfred Kunicke" >Are you using PVM today? Yes we do, mostly in a test mode to get some experience in programming and controlling (XPVM). >What are your application(s)? currently there are no "production applications" >How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? HP9000(2*735, 1*715) regards m.kunicke ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: sbokhari@shb.lhe.imran.pk (Shahid H. Bokhari) > Are you using PVM today? Yes > What are your application(s)? Parallel computing research and teaching. We have just started and expect to have some specific applications on soon. At that point we will be in a position to offer specific suggestions for improvement. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? 4 IBM PC Compatible 486/66 +2 386/33, running Linux. Thanks for PVM! Shahid Bokhari Department of Electrical Engineering University of Engineering & Technology Lahore 54890 Pakistan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gerhard Wilhelms > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > > What are your application(s)? PVM is used as educational tool for lectures in parallel programming. > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? ‾30 IBM RS/6000 [lines deleted] Best regards, Gerhard Wilhelms _____________________________________________________________________ University of Augsburg (Germany) Department of Mathematics - Computer Science Universitaetsstrasse 2 Phone : +49 +821/598-2176 D-86159 Augsburg Fax : 598-2200 Internet: Wilhelms@Informatik.Uni-Augsburg.DE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: alm01@sican.de (Praktikant AR(W.van Almsick)) > > Are you using PVM today? > Yes, I do. > What are your application(s)? > I'm on myself just making benchmarks on diferent (virtual) parallel architectures. We have written a "benchmark generator" so everyone can make his own benchmarks on his own parallel architecture with his own application specific workload. So everyone who wants to use a (virtual) parallel machine can test the computing and the communication behaviour before he buys the machine. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? > I'm using up to eight HPPA workstations, a CONVEX parallel computer and in future a CRAY. > Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. > Please email the information to pvm-survey@cs.utk.edu. > We like to run our project on an NCUBE because it grows up on an it under PICL. But there is no version of PVM for the NCUBE. So, we would like to have an version for the NCUBE. I hope this helps you, Karsten Zander ************************************************************* * * * * Karsten Zander * E-Mail: alm01@sican.de * * * zander@irb.uni-hannover.de * * * * * * Germany, University of Hannover * * * * ************************************************************* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jan@nats2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Jan Amtrup) > Are you using PVM today? Yes. > What are your application(s)? PVM we implemented a communications facility modeled after the channels of Occam and the transputer. We designed interfaces for C, C++, Common Lisp, Prolog and Tcl/Tk. The communication system is actually used within the German joint research project Verbmobil for message passing between different modules. Additionaly, it is used to explore novel architectonic issues for natural language understanding systems, which are inverstigated as a subproject of Verbmobil. > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? I personally use Sun Sparstations 2 and 10 under SunOs 4.1.x and Solaris 2.3 Other partners in our project use HP Workstations under HPUX or IBM RS6000 (and maybe some others which I don't know of). Regards, Jan. _______________________________________________________________________ Jan Willers Amtrup Phone: (+49 40) 54 715-519 Universitaet Hamburg Fax: (+49 40) 54 715-515 FB Informatik (AB NatS) e-mail: amtrup@informatik.uni-hamburg.de Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 jan@nats2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de D-22527 Hamburg GERMANY _______________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Winfrid Tschiedel > > Are you using PVM today? Yes > > What are your application(s)? So we are selling computers, our main interest is, that PVM is available on these platforms. We are just using PVM in benchmarks > > How many and what kind of machines have you used with PVM? Fujitsu M780/10 running UXP/M V12L10 several SGI Workstations running IRIX 5.2 SGI Powerchallenge (4 x R8000 ) IRIX 6.0 KSR-1 ( 16 processor ) KSR OS 1.2.2 -- ____________________________________________________________