pypvm home page

Overview

pypvm is a Python module which allows interaction with the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) package. PVM allows a collection of computers connected by a network to serve as a single parallel computer. More information about the PVM package can be found at http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm.

Pypvm is intended to be an educational and prototyping tool.

The primary authors of Pypvm are W. Michael Petullo, who can be contacted at pypvm@flyn.org, and Greg Baker, who can be contacted at gregb@ifost.org.au , and Sam Tannous, who can be contacted at stannous@cisco.com . There is just one mailing-list at the moment, which is hardly ever used: pypvm-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net

Download

It is available via HTTP from pypvm.sourceforge.net/pypvm-0.94.tar.gz, and prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pypvm/pypvm-0.94.tar.gz.

The usual story applies: gunzip and tar xvf the file, or use whatever tools read .tar.gz files on your operating system. Then read the INSTALL and README files, which should be sufficiently informative.

It has only been tested on Linux/x86 and Linux/PPC, although there is no reason to expect it wouldn't work on anything else.

There is a CVS web interface -- development is quite slow, though, so this isn't heavily used.

History

The first Python-PVM interworking package was written by Stefane Fermigier.

Greg Baker patched pvmmodule.c to work with PVM3.3.11 & Python1.5 in 1997 and 1998. No attempt was made to be backwardly compatible. PyPVM version 0.12 was released in June 1998. It was based on the output of swig and heavily cleaned up. It then suffered considerable bit-rot as Greg stopped working on it actively.

W. Michael Petullo independantly developed a complete set of bindings for PVM3.4 (with which PyPVM did not work well). He called this pypvm. Version 0.8.7 was released in November 1999.

In May 2000, the two projects merged into one, still called pypvm. This was version 0.90.

Version 0.91 fixes some bugs, and version 0.92 adds support for python 2.1. Version 0.94 adds support for python 2.3.