Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM abbreviated) is a software used for the manufacture of a parallel computer network. The software is designed in such a way as to allow a computer network consisting of heterogeneous machines running Windows or Unix operating system to be used as a single distributed parallel processor. It aims to solve some computational problems more cheaply by using the processing power and memory of computers that are networked. The software itself is portable, and its source code was freely available through netlib, which has now been compiled for use by various types of computers, from laptops to supercomputers Cray. [1]
PVM allows the user to use the computer hardware that have been there to solve more complex problems at a cheaper price. PVM is also used as a tool in academia, especially to teach parallel programming (in the faculty of computer science, and of course used to solve some practical problems. [1]
The first version of PVM was developed at ORNL in 1989, and then after re-developed from scratch by the University of Tennessee, version 2 was released in March 1991. Version 3 was released in 1993 and supports the features of fault tolerance (fault-tolerance;;) and better portability. The latest version is 3.4.6, released on February 2, 2009.
PVM also actively developed, despite the relative maturity and stability that showed nothing significant. PVM is considered as a new step in the trend of modern parallel processing and grid computing. Its use is also much, and now also appear some new programming language bindings (as well as modules in the Perl language Parallel:: PVM, which is in active development). The interface is released under the Perl Artistic License, [2] though PVM itself was released with a license BSD License and GNU General Public License. .
Sources: http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Virtual_Machine