Re: MPI vs PVM

["Jorge L. deLyra" <delyra@latt.if.usp.br>]

> I have to do a choice between MPI or PVM to use to develop image
> processing aplications .
>
> After to do this choice and start to study a lot, could someone tell me
> some sugestion ?  This would be very useful ..

We use PVM here. Here are some pointers:

1) There is better documentation for PVM, including free books and
   documentation on the web. This was a key fact in the choice here.

2) There is a PVM interface for python, another key fact. At the time no
   such things existed for MPI, but might exist now.

3) The PVM graphical interface (xpvm) works better than the MPI one
   (xmpi), at least on Debian Linux.

4) MPI was meant for hardware-homogeneous clusters, PVM allows the use of
   heterogeneous hardware architectures, it's more flexible.

5) PVM is older and seems to be better developed, at least if we are
   talking of the free software versions of MPI (mpich).

I believe PVM was created in academia and developed in the free software
community, while MPI was designed by a committee of information industry
representatives as an industry standard for message passing, meant to be
implemented by companies making parallel supercomputers. Hence, PVM does
tend to adapt better to the present day world of Linux clusters made and
managed by its users.

If you are going to develop software locally on a Linux cluster, I bet it
is better to start trying PVM.  But, if you are going to use some package
of software already developed elsewhere, free or otherwise, then use what
it was developed for or has support for, which often is MPI. You can just
install both on your cluster, by the way.
							Cheers,

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        Jorge L. deLyra,  Associate Professor of Physics
            The University of Sao Paulo,  IFUSP-DFMA
       For more information: finger delyra@latt.if.usp.br
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