Talk:Parallel Virtual Machine

Conflicting information
Both Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface have conflicting information, and blatant POV.

From Parallel Virtual Machine as of February 6, 2007:
 * 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.

From Message Passing Interface as of February 6, 2007:
 * MPI is a de facto standard for communication among the processes modeling a parallel program on a distributed memory system. Often these programs are mapped to clusters, actual distributed memory supercomputers, and to other environments. However, the principal MPI-1 model has no shared memory concept, and MPI-2 has only a limited distributed shared memory concept used in one portion of that set of extensions.

Since both PVM and MPI are used for distributed parallel applications, more or less for the same purpose, but they are incompatible with each other, it is strange that both are de facto standard.

-- Juliano (T) 00:47, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The claim that PVM is a de facto standard was removed by an anonymous editor on 29 November 2007. No reason appears to have been given. JamesBWatson (talk) 20:40, 31 October 2008 (UTC)


 * A good reason may be that it is not true that it is the standard. And the article does have a sales-like tone anyway. History2007 (talk) 23:50, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Why PVM failed
Perhaps this article could mention reasons why PVM failed to become a standard for parallel programming. There is an interesting discussion of these in "Part VII - Why PVM Failed" of the blog entry Parallel Programming - Using PVM. JonH (talk) 16:14, 4 September 2015 (UTC)