PVM module available

["John E. Davis" <davis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am pleased to announce the availability of a new S-Lang module for
the PVM library.  PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package
which permits a heterogeneous collection of computers connected by a
network to be used as a single large parallel computer.  Hence, PVM
permits a large computation to be distributed over many processors.

In addition to wrapping many of the PVM functions, the module provides
a high-level interface (pvm_ms) that vastly simplifies the creation of
code that follows the master-slave paradigm:

   "The pvm_ms interface provides a means for handling computations which
   consist of a predetermined list of tasks which can be performed by
   running arbitrary slave processes which take command-line arguments.
   The interface provides a high degree of robustness, allowing one to
   add or delete hosts from the PVM while the distributed process is
   running and also ensuring that the task list will be completed even if
   one or more slave hosts fail (e.g. crash) during the computation.
   Experience has shown that this failure tolerance is surprisingly
   important. Long-running distributed computations experience failure of
   one or more hosts with surprising frequency and it is essential that
   such failures do not require restarting the entire distributed
   computation from the beginning."

For additional information about the PVM module as well as
instructions for downloading the source code, please visit
<http://space.mit.edu/CXC/software/slang/modules/pvm/>.  The module
is distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License.

Enjoy, --John