MPICH2

Introduction

MPICH2 is a portable implementation of MPI, a standard for message-passing for distrubuted memory applications used in parallel computing. It provides an MPI implementation that efficiently supports different computation and communication platform including commodity clusters, high-speed networks and proprietry high-end computing systems. MPICH2 is Free Software and is available for most flavours of Unix and Microsoft Windows.

MPICH2 provides a separation of process management and communication. The default runtime environment consists of a set of daemons, called mpd, that establish communication among the machines to be used before application process startup, thus providing a clearer picture of what is wrong when communication cannot be established and providing a fast and scalable startup mechanism when parallel jobs are started.

Vendor :-MPICH2

Version :-1.2.1

MPICH2 on dell cluster

MPICH2 is installed on all the four nodes of the cluster..

MPICH2 is an all-new implementation of the MPI Standard, designed to implement all of the MPI-2 additions to MPI like dynamic process management, one-sided operations, parallel I/O, and other extensions making it more robust, efficient, and convenient to use.

How to Use:

Login to dell-cluster with your computational loginid .

On Dell cluster, MPICH2 is installed in /opt/mpich2-1.2.1

Users have to set the enviromental variable PATH in order to use MPICH2.

For tcsh and csh, or

setenv PATH /opt/mpich2-1.2.1/bin:$PATH

For bash and sh

export PATH=/opt/mpich2-1.2.1/bin:$PATH

Note: Dell cluster supports MPICH2 jobs that run within the nodes.

To use MPICH2, the following commands must be run at the shell prompt for the first time

echo "secretword=ASecretWord" > ~/.mpd.conf
chmod 600 .mpd.conf
mpd &

Note: The secretword can be any string of user choice

Compiling and Linking

Users can use mpicc, mpicxx, mpif90 commands, for compiling C, C++, Fortran programs, respectively.

Running Programs

After the program had successfully compiled and the executable has been created, users can you mpiexec to run their jobs. The simplest form of a command to start a MPI job is

mpiexec -n 8 a.out

to start the executable a.out with 8 processes.

Submitting MPICH2 jobs through PBS

Documentation:
MPICH2 User Guide

Report Problems to:

If you encounter any problem in using this software Please report to us at the following email address helpdesk.serc@auto.iisc.ac.in or contact System Administrator, #103, SERC.