The following is from the PVM homepage at

http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html

"PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or NT computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers. The software is very portable. The source, which is available free thru netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to CRAYs.

PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much larger problems at minimal additional cost. Hundreds of sites around the world are using PVM to solve important scientific, industrial, and medical problems in addition to PVM's use as an educational tool to teach parallel programming. With tens of thousands of users, PVM has become the de facto standard for distributed computing world-wide. "


This Dynamic Loadable Module (DLM) for IDL allows you to make PVM calls from within IDL programs. The following list is the IDL equivalents of the PVM calls.

IDLPVM_ADDHOSTS
IDLPVM_BARRIER
IDLPVM_BCAST
IDLPVM_BUFINFO
IDLPVM_MYTID
IDLPVM_EXIT
IDLPVM_FREEBUF
IDLPVM_GETINST
IDLPVM_GETOPT
IDLPVM_GETRBUF
IDLPVM_GETSBUF
IDLPVM_GETTID
IDLPVM_GSIZE
IDLPVM_JOINGROUP
IDLPVM_KILL
IDLPVM_LVGROUP
IDLPVM_MKBUF
IDLPVM_MSTAT
IDLPVM_PARENT
IDLPVM_PROBE
IDLPVM_PSTAT
IDLPVM_NRECV
IDLPVM_SETOPT
IDLPVM_SETRBUF
IDLPVM_SETSBUF
IDLPVM_SPAWN
IDLPVM_TIDTOHOST
IDLPVM_CONFIG
IDLPVM_HALT
IDLPVM_INITSEND
IDLPVM_MCAST
IDLPVM_PACK
IDLPVM_PERROR
IDLPVM_RECV
IDLPVM_SEND
IDLPVM_UNPACK

With this set of calls you can call slave programs written in C or IDL.

This DLM requires IDL 5.4 and newer to run.

If you would like to receive a trial version,

 send an email to info@kilvarock.com and a thirty day trial version will be sent to you.