Although PVM was developed to use a network of heterogeneous UNIX computers as a single large parallel computer, it has become an interface for portable programming even on MPP's. We present PVM performance results for a massively parallel transputer system with up to 512 processors. In comparison to an implementation of the same application in the native transputer operating system Parix, we realized about 30% performance loss for the PVM application. This is mainly caused by restrictions in the process model and the less efficient communication of PVM in comparison to Parix.
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