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A number of current parallel machines have a complete version of Unix on each node. That is, it is possible to log in and execute normal process and file maintenance commands ( ps, ls, cp, etc. This is sometimes necessary to maintain files that are local to a node (e.g., in its \tmp) or to examine processes that are running on the node. In some cases there are vendor-supplied tools for doing this sort of thing, but at best they are specialized to a particular machine, while at worst they don't exist. Our experience has been that users prefer to use the commands familiar to them. This project will attempt to provide such commands.
A network of Unix workstations is a parallel computer that fits this description, and the tools we describe here can be used in that environment as well as in the MPP environment.