article on parallel virtual machine

Paper: astro-ph/0510688
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 15:17:36 GMT (28kb)

Title: Using the Parallel Virtual Machine for Everyday Analysis
Authors: M.S. Noble, J.C. Houck, J.E. Davis, A. Young, M. Nowak
Comments: 4 pages; manuscript for oral presentation given at ADASS XV,
Madrid
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   A review of the literature reveals that while parallel computing is
sometimes
employed by astronomers for custom, large-scale calculations, no package
fosters the routine application of parallel methods to standard problems in
astronomical data analysis. This paper describes our attempt to close
that gap
by wrapping the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) as a scriptable S-Lang
module.
Using PVM within ISIS, the Interactive Spectral Interpretation System, we've
distributed a number of representive calculations over a network of 25+
CPUs to
achieve dramatic reductions in execution times. We discuss how the approach
applies to a wide class of modeling problems, outline our efforts to make it
more transparent for common use, and note its growing importance in the
context
of the large, multi-wavelength datasets used in modern analysis.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0510688 , 28kb)
Received on Tue Nov 1 10:39:55 2005