Comparison between PVM on RHODOS and Unix

Presents the architecture, services and performance results obtained from the implementation of the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) parallel processing tool supported by either the Unix operating system or the RHODOS distributed operating system. It is shown that the provision of several advanced services in RHODOS allow the implementation of PVM to be greatly simplified, and significant speed-ups to applications can be achieved. These services allow the dynamic establishment of a virtual machine by removing heavily loaded and adding idle/lightly loaded workstations, placing processes on workstations to optimise static allocation, instantiating processes using group process creation and balancing load dynamically using process migration. The performance study shows that the processing time of PVM applications executed on the RHODOS virtual machine is much shorter than those achieved on the Unix virtual machine