Utility Functions

Utility Functions

Most utility functions in PVM have corresponding setup options in the parallel setup facility that comes with a particular MPI implementation. Some of these utility functions may not be available; note, however, that these functions do not directly affect the basic characteristics of the application. Instead they are provided as a convenience to programmers. Such functions include pvm_catchout(), pvm_getopt(), pvm_setopt() and pvm_tidtohost().

A PVM task has a parent task, whose task ID is returned by the pvm_parent() call. Since MPI tasks are not spawned by other MPI tasks, this concept of a parent task does not exist in MPI. Hence you must remove all instances of pvm_parent() and handle their logical consequences in the program. For instance, one of the most common reasons for finding out the parent's task ID is to send computation-result messages back to it; this functionality can be easily replicated in an MPI program (or even a PVM program) by a task declaring itself to be the logical parent to whom all the computation-result messages should be sent.