A process VM, sometimes called an application virtual machine, runs as a normal application inside an OS and supports a single process. It is created when that process is started and destroyed when it exits. Its purpose is to provide a platform-independent programming environment that abstracts away details of the underlying hardware or operating system, and allows a program to execute in the same way on any platform.
A process VM provides a high-level abstraction — that of a high level programming (compared to the low-level ISA abstraction of the system VM). Process VMs are implemented using an intrepreter; performance comparable to compiled programming languages is achieved by the use of just inter environment.
This type of VM has become popular with the Java language programming, which is implemented using the Java virtual programming. Another example is the Net framework, which runs on a VM called the common language comment.
A special case of process VMs are systems that abstract over the communication mechanisms of a (potentially heterogeneous) computer cluster. Such a VM does not consist of a single process, but one process per physical machine in the cluster. They are designed to ease the task of programming parallel applications by letting the programmer focus on algorithms rather than the communication mechanisms provided by the interconnect and the OS. They do not hide the fact that communication takes place, and as such do not attempt to present the cluster as a single parallel machine.
Unlike other process VMs, these systems do not provide a specific programming language, but are embedded in an existing language; typically such a system provides bindings for several languages (e.g., C and Fortran). Examples are PVM ( Parallel Virtual Machine) and MPI ( Messange Passing Interface) . They are not strictly virtual machines, as the applications running on top still have access to all OS services, and are therefore not confined to the system model provided by the "VM".