This is an underlying latent program that resides on every machine included in the host pool. Every user with a valid login can install a pvmd on a given machine. Here is every function call needed to create, kill and communicate with the different tasks. The task is an important koncept. It is a unit of parallellism.
Tasks have great power and can start or stop other tasks, or reconfigure the host pool.
The TID is used every time that tasks in any way refer to other tasks, e g in message passing, task creation or deletion etc. These languages were chosen to constitute the platform on wich to build PVM programs since they are the most common parallell programming languages. A PVM program is divided into tasks. Each task is responsible for some portion of the total workload. Physically, a task is a separate program file with embedded PVM calls.