Sciddle 4.0, or, Remote Procedure Calles in PVM

Sciddle 4.0 makes it possible to use remote procedure calls (RPCs) within the PVM environment. Parallelism is achieved through asynchronous RPCs. No explicit message passing is necessary. Rather all data transfers occur within the RPCs. In Sciddle, an application is decomposed into a client process and an arbitrary number of server processes. Servers are special PVM tasks that are ready to execute RPCs from their clients. Servers can also start other servers themselves. Thus the topology of a Sciddle application can be described by a tree structure. Sciddle applications enjoy the safety and ease of use of RPCs. They are also extremely portable as PVM becomes available on more and more platforms. In this paper we show that the overhead introduced by Sciddle is minimal and can be neglected for applications with large data sets.