Sender: dorman@elmo Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm Subject: Re: PVM based programming....... References: <361815EC.DBD5F7D0@webchamps.com> From: Clark Dorman Message-Id: Date: Mon, 05 Oct 1998 12:27:47 GMT Organization: PSINet Chris Wertman writes: > Well.....here goes.....and Ive got my anti flame guard up for the > following message........ The only problem is your formatting. > 1 I am new to Paralell computing.........so here goes....... > I have approximatley 5 systems here at my home , 200 mhz to 450 > mhz...... > all running some flavor of windoze and linux all soon to be NT/Linux > dual boots......... > Now I use linux for my servers and test setups....but am not really > comfortable from a development standpoint other than minor hacks.... > > NOW .......my father accross town has the same setup......... > AND we have a 10mbit full time connection between our networks.......... That's probably plenty big enough for most applications. The biggest problem that I've had with getting PVM to work is the requirement for rsh capability across the network. Can you set it up to do that? > Am I right in assuming we can utilize the resources of both for a single > computational task ? or is the 10 mbit connection to utilize all these > resources...i.e. would we achive better performance gains by use of our > networks at 100 individually.....? Yes, the 10 mbit connections is going to be just fine for many applications. In other applications 100 is going to be too small. Here's the important question: what do you want to do? I work on a job distrubuter / load leveling program and the amount of data is trivial. If you are doing very high bandwidth scientific compuations (say, you want to do computational fluid dynamics), then it might be better to partition the problem into two sections and do them independently. > Now my C is rusty....well...coroding into the ground as we > speak........Sooooo > because of work I have been thrust pretty deep into Visual > Basic.....threads are not a problem for me in VB if its neccesary for > the application to be multi-threaded.....that is if PVM requires it.. No, the point (well, a point) of PVM is that it does not need to be threaded. You actually have to be careful if you do use PVM and threads, or so I've heard since I've stayed away from mixing them. > Is it possibe to write a program in VB (5 or 6) that will take advantage > of the PVM ??? > If so where can I find information on this ....??? > If not ...why ???? > And if no one knows why is it still perhaps possible and where would I > find some models(simple) to port and start with to test ? Download PVM, compile it, run it with the examples in the examples directory. To see what your bandwidth looks like (and it will give you an idea of just how much data is being passed in an intuitive sense), download NETPIPE at: http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/netpipe/ For the source code, get the 2.3beta version since earlier versions did not have PVM support. -- Clark Dorman "Evolution is cleverer than you are." http://cns-web.bu.edu/pub/dorman/D.html -Francis Crick