Experiences with Windows NT as a Cluster Computing Platform for Parallel Computing

The increasing number of clusters built by commercial, o the shelf hardware shows a new trend in scienti c computing. Within this movement is the propagation towards Windows NT (tm) as an operating system on PCs. The UNIX environment and Windows NT di er in terms of administrative issues as well as programming techniques. In this paper, we describe the modi cation of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) to interoperate with WIN32 (Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95). PVM provides the functionality to accumulate the computing power of an NT cluster environment. Our migration from UNIX to the WIN32 architecture not only shows where porting existing software is easy and where more generic modules have to be designed, but also the limitations. PVM for UNIX and WIN32 environments is freely available at netlib: http://www.netlib.org/pvm3/index.html