Migrating from PVM to MPI

Question

I'm working on migrating a project from PVM to MPI. I wanted to ask if anyone here has done so before and if there exists any tutorials or manuals on the correspondance between functions in PVM and MPI.

Answer 1

I have a lot of resources I've been using over the past few days

• MPJ Papers
• mpj: enabling parallel simulations in java
• MPJ MIT
• MPJ java docs
• Google Scholar MPI

No problem with MPI by the way each processor runs synchronously in parallel with all the other processors, and every processor shares a different address space. (You can experiment this for yourself with java.util.Date and run System.out.println statements to the console and you'll see when you send something and receive something using point-to-point or unblocked communication, the process will recieve at the same time it was sent in a synchronous fashion). Send and recieve is better to think about when your at the dinner table and you ask a relative to give you a fork, you would recieve the fork at the same as it is being sent (i.e. being handed directly to you).

Answer 2

Chapter 9 of the useful book Using MPI talks pretty explicitly about comparing PVM and MPI and what you'd have to do to port.

They're both message-passing libraries, and if you're mostly using point-to-point communications or basic collectives, the port should be quite straightforward. PVM though always had a lot more support for dynamic processes creation and management than even recent MPI standards have had, and if your code relies heavily on those sorts of features, it will be harder.