PVM and MPI interna

[William Gropp]

At 08:57 AM 7/17/2000 +0200, Sebastian Wenner wrote:
>Hi !
>
>I'm writing a diploma thesis about Linux Clusters which includes PVM and MPI.
>
>Has someone links to some sites where the internas of PVM and MPI are 
>explained ? I have only 10 weeks for the whole thing so there's no time to 
>read and understand (!) the source code of these two.
>
>Or could someone of you explain in short words how the thing works (-> job 
>distribution, synchronisation, differences between the two, ...)

I believe the PVM book describes the internals of PVM, at least at the time 
of the book.  MPI is a standard and has no single implementation (think of 
a C compiler; there is no one way to organize it).  You can find 
descriptions of some of the MPI implementations in the literature; see 
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/papers for a bibliography of some MPI papers 
(note to beowulf readers: if you want to submit something to this 
bibliography, send it to gropp at mcs.anl.gov ).  There are papers that talk 
about the similarities and differences in the PVM and MPI definitions 
(e.g., http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~gropp/papers/pvmmpi/paper.ps ).

Bill