Research Seminar - May 27, 1998

Title:	Process Topologies For The Parallel Virtual Machine
Speaker:	Kamran Kazemi
	Computer Science
Date:	Wednesday 27 May, 1998
Time:	3.15pm
Venue:	GGLT2

Abstract

The computational power required by today's grand challenge scientific and engineering problems has been the prime reason for the emergence of supercomputers and distributed memory multi-processors. These machines have efficiently solved a wide variety of scientific and commercial applications. However, they are extremely expensive and access to them is often severely constrained for those wishing to experiment with, and develop, parallel programs. The emergence of relatively high speed network links interconnecting powerful personal computers (PCs) and workstations has dramatically improved access to parallel computing facilities, but many additional difficulties have been introduced through attempts to use them as a general parallel computing platform. The Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a user level communication library that offers a practical solution.

This seminar presents the design and implementation of a flexible process topology server and library for the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) environment. Together they allow the expression and development of parallel algorithms using natural, abstract communication contexts. Written as a PVM application, the topology server and its library provide a minimal set of functions that adequately address topology based communication requirements. Our new approach enables parallel programmers to implement new topologies without having to modify the topology server or the library.