Tkpvm version 1.0

The latest version of this file can be found at
http://www.nici.kun.nl/tkpvm/welcome.html

What is tkpvm

tkpvm is the result of a wedding. The husband is pvm3.3.x (preferably
3.3.10) and the wife is Tcl7.5/Tk4.1. Probably it will work unchanged for
pvm3.4.0, but that is not released yet so I cannot try it out. As usual with
a marriage, both sides profit from the combination:

PVM-users
     The Tcl-language is an interpreted scripting language. With Tkpvm you
     can now write pvm processes in the Tcl language, as opposed to C or
     Fortran. No compilations are necessary any more, once you created pvmsh
     and pvmwish. The shell program pvmsh can be seen as an enhanced version
     of the pvm console. It can control the virtual machine in the same way
     as the pvm console does, but it is a full shell with history
     substitution ('!!') and variables.
     The pvmwish interpreter has the same function as pvmsh, but in addition
     it has a lot of commands to build your own grapical user interface.
     There are buttons, entry widgets, menu's and so on. Now each process
     can have input and output through it's own X11-window.
Tcl/Tk-users
     PVM is a library for controlling a virtual parallel machine which
     consists of any number of hosts. Processes can spawn and kill each
     other and communicate through a pvm-channel. It can be compared with
     the Tk 'send' command, only it works with sockets. Therefore it runs
     without Tk (X11), and the processes can use different displays and run
     on different hosts. In addition, pvmsh takes control of the event loop
     from Tcl, while pvmwish does the same with Tk. The library can also be
     dynamically loaded in tclsh or wish, only you have to provide your own
     event-loop then (a small patch to Tcl/Tk which makes this not necessary
     any more is provided in the patch subdirectory of the Tkpvm
     distribution).

The pvm-related commands that can be used in Tcl now are:
     send, recv
          Send and recieve anything from or to any other process.
     spawn, kill
          Spawn and kill other processes.
     tasks
          Request information about running tasks.
     bind
          Bind pvm-related events in the Tcl/Tk event loop. This is a very
          powerful command which makes programming an event-driven
          application much easier. To do the same in C or Fortran is much
          more difficult. PVM has no equivalent function for this. Tk has,
          but originall it is only used for X-events. Now the same can be
          done with PVM-events.
     And many more.....

How to install tkpvm

Tkpvm can be downloaded from 6 sites (as far as I know):

   * NICI ftp-server (The Netherlands)
   * Tcl archive (and other mirrors of these)
   * Internet Parallel Computing Archive (U.K.)
   * Mirror in Australia
   * Mirror in France
   * Mirror in Japan

Before you configure and compile tkpvm1.0, first install Tcl7.5 and pvm3.3.x
(preferabble 3.3.10 or later). If you want graphical capabilities you need
Tk4.1 too.

   * ftp://ftp.smli.com/pub/tcl/tcl7.5.tar.gz
   * ftp://ftp.smli.com/pub/tcl/tk4.1.tar.gz
   * http://www.netlib.org/pvm3/pvm3.3.10.tar.gz

If you want to be able to create standalone applications (that don't need
installation of Tcl/Tk on your system to run), you need to apply the
"plus"-patches to Tcl and Tk:

   * ftp://ftp.nici.kun.nl/pub/tkpvm/tcl7.5plus.patch.gz
   * ftp://ftp.nici.kun.nl/pub/tkpvm/tk4.1plus.patch.gz

Copy the patch files to the main directories of Tcl or Tk, and run the GNU
'patch' utility. Gunzip (to uncompress .gz-files) and patch can be
downloaded from:

   * ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/gzip-1.2.4.tar
   * ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/patch-2.1.tar.gz

But if you cannot do that, there are full distributions available of these
adapted versions of Tcl7.5/Tk4.1. All adaptations made are fully upwards
compatible with the official SUN distributions:

   * ftp://ftp.nici.kun.nl/pub/tkpvm/tcl7.5plus.tar.gz
   * ftp://ftp.nici.kun.nl/pub/tkpvm/tk4.1plus.tar.gz

For pvm3.3.x, don't forget that the environment variables PVM_ROOT and
PVM_ARCH need to be set at all times. Best is to define these in your
'.cshrc'. Also, it is useful to add several paths that are used for pvm to
the 'path' variable (for the executables) and the 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH'
environment variable (LPATH or SHLIB_PATH for HP_UX). An example file
"cshrc.stub" is provided. You could append this file to your .cshrc file.

Create your ".Pvm_hosts" file, which is the default hostfile for pvmsh and
pvmwish. If you don't create this file, only the current machine will be
present in the initial network. You can always add new machines to the
virtual machine by the "addhost" command.

Run "configure" and "make". It is advised that you configure Tcl, Tk and
Tkpvm with the option "--enable-shared". This results in shared libraries
being created, which costs less memory and results in much smaller
executables:

--enable-shared
     Enable creation of shared library

In addition, make has the following options:

static
     Make static executables
standalone
     Make standalone executables
pvmsh
     Make pvmsh
pvmwish
     Make pvmwish
test
     Make and execute test
hello.c
     Create example C-code of tcl-script
hello
     Create example standalone executable of tcl-script

More Information about Tcl/Tk and PVM

There is a Tcl/Tk home page and a PVM home page on the WWW. And there are
newsgroups comp.lang.tcl and comp.parallel.pvm where you can get more help.

There also is more information available in the tkpvm index
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written by J. Nijtmans for the [MIAMI]  project