Processor Communications

Portable message passing systems,

• Message Passing Interface (MPI),

  This is the new international standard and is expected to become much more prominent in the coming years. It is very similar to PVM but has a little extra functionality.

• Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM),

  This is currently (1996 Jun) the most popular.

• Parmacs (macro and library),

  This was Europes' attempt at a message passing system. It was very successful and provided a lot of input to the MPI project.

All systems can operate on heterogeneous networks.

For example, (pseudo code),

    Send(to_pid,buffer,length)   ! Send buffer
    Recv(from_pid,buffer,length) ! Receive buffer
    Bcst(from_pid,buffer,length) ! Broadcast buffer
    Barrier()                    ! Synchronise