Setup to Use PVM



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Setup to Use PVM

One  of the reasons for PVM's popularity is that it is simple to set up and use. PVM does not require special privileges to be installed. Anyone with a valid login on the hosts can do so. In addition, only one person at an organization needs to get and install PVM for everyone at that organization to use it.

PVM uses two environment variables when starting and running. Each PVM user needs to set these two variables to use PVM. The first variable is PVM_ROOT , which is set to the location of the installed pvm3 directory. The second variable is PVM_ARCH , which tells PVM the architecture of this host and thus what executables to pick from the PVM_ROOT directory.

The easiest method is to set these two variables in your .cshrc file. We assume you are using csh as you follow along this tutorial. Here is an example for setting PVM_ROOT:

setenv PVM_ROOT $HOME/pvm3
It is recommended that the user set PVM_ARCH by concatenating to the file .cshrc, the content of file $PVM_ROOT/lib/cshrc.stub. The stub should be placed after PATH and PVM_ROOT are defined. This stub automatically determines the PVM_ARCH for this host and is particularly useful when the user shares a common file system (such as NFS) across several different architectures.

Table 1 lists the PVM_ARCH names and their corresponding architecture types that are supported in PVM 3.3.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
PVM_ARCH  Machine                        Notes
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AFX8      Alliant FX/8
ALPHA     DEC Alpha                      DEC OSF-1
BAL       Sequent Balance                DYNIX
BFLY      BBN Butterfly TC2000  
BSD386    80386/486 PC runnning Unix     BSDI, 386BSD, NetBSD
CM2       Thinking Machines CM2          Sun front-end
CM5       Thinking Machines CM5          Uses native messages
CNVX      Convex C-series                IEEE f.p.
CNVXN     Convex C-series                native f.p.
CRAY      C-90, YMP, T3D port available  UNICOS
CRAY2     Cray-2
CRAYSMP   Cray S-MP
DGAV      Data General Aviion
E88K      Encore 88000
HP300     HP-9000 model 300              HPUX
HPPA      HP-9000 PA-RISC
I860      Intel iPSC/860                 Uses native messages
IPSC2     Intel iPSC/2 386 host          SysV, Uses native messages
KSR1      Kendall Square KSR-1           OSF-1, uses shared memory
LINUX     80386/486 PC running Unix      LINUX
MASPAR    Maspar
MIPS      MIPS 4680
NEXT      NeXT
PGON      Intel Paragon                  Uses native messages
PMAX      DECstation 3100, 5100          Ultrix
RS6K      IBM/RS6000                     AIX 3.2
RT        IBM RT
SGI       Silicon Graphics IRIS          IRIX 4.x
SGI5      Silicon Graphics IRIS          IRIX 5.x
SGIMP     SGI multiprocessor             Uses shared memory
SUN3      Sun 3                          SunOS 4.2
SUN4      Sun 4, SPARCstation            SunOS 4.2
SUN4SOL2  Sun 4, SPARCstation            Solaris 2.x
SUNMP     SPARC multiprocessor           Solaris 2.x, uses shared memory
SYMM      Sequent Symmetry
TITN      Stardent Titan
U370      IBM 370                        AIX
UVAX      DEC MicroVAX
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Table: PVM_ARCH names used in PVM 3

The PVM source comes with directories and makefiles for most architectures you are likely to have. Chapter 8 describes how to port the PVM source to an unsupported architecture. Building for each architecture type is done automatically by logging on to a host, going into the PVM_ROOT directory, and typing make. The makefile will automatically determine which architecture it is being executed on, create appropriate subdirectories, and build pvm, pvmd3, libpvm3.a, and libfpvm3.a, pvmgs, and libgpvm3.a. It places all these files in $PVM_ROOT/lib/PVM_ARCH, with the exception of pvmgs which is placed in $PVM_ROOT/bin/PVM_ARCH.



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Next: Setup Summary Up: Using PVM Previous: How to Obtain