Tools for Heterogeneous Network Computing

Wide area computer networks have become a basic part of today's computing infrastructure. These networks connect a variety of machines, presenting an enormous computing resource. In this project we focus on developing methods and tools which allow a programmer to tap into this resource. In this paper we describe PVM and HeNCE, tools and methodology under development that assists a programmer in developing programs to execute on a networked group of heterogeneous machines. HeNCE is implemented on top of a system called PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine). PVM is a software package that allows the utilization of a heterogeneous network of parallel and serial computers as a single computational resource. PVM provides facilities for spawning, communication, and synchronization of processes over a network of heterogeneous machines. While PVM provides the low level tools for implementing parallel programs, HeNCE provides the programmer with a higher level abstraction for specifying parallelism.