It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous Unix and/or Windows machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor.
[3] PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much larger problems at less additional cost.
PVM was a step towards modern trends in distributed processing and grid computing but has, since the mid-1990s, largely been supplanted by the much more successful MPI standard for message passing on parallel machines.
The individual computers may be shared-memory or local-memory multiprocessors, vector supercomputers, specialized graphics engines, or scalar workstations and PCs, that may be interconnected by a variety of networks, such as Ethernet or FDDI.
PVM consists of a run-time environment and library for message passing, task and resource management, and fault notification.