1994 Reports

PGMAKE: A Portable Distributed Make System

Lih, Andrew; Zadok, Erez

We describe pgmake, which extends the GNU project‘s make utility to support distributed job execution using the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) package from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These two packages were chosen because of their high level of portability to different architectures, free source code distribution policy and availability to the public. Using medium-sized farms of modest performing workstations, our system has achieved software build times faster than expensive high-speed uni- and multiprocessors. The highly portable code additions make this implementation easy to port among various platforms.