MPI / MPICH
Message Passing Interface

MPI is the standard message passing protocol.

MPICH is a freely available, portable implementation of MPI. MPICH is a joint-effort project between Argonne National Laboratory (Bill Gropp and Rusty Lusk) and Mississippi State University (Tony Skjellum and Nathan Doss). Hubertus Franke of IBM has also made major contributions, as have Ed Karrels and Patrick Bridges (student interns at ANL). The difficult job of getting the spec right was done by the MPI Forum as a whole.

The implementation of MPI on the Marvel platforms and the Opteron cluster is based on MPICH.

MPI is installed on BigBen, pople, salk, and the opteron cluster.

Get started with MPI with the following PSC tutorials:

Message Passing Basics
Advanced MPI-1 and MPI-2

For specific information on compiling and running an MPI program on PSC platforms follow these links:

• MPI on bigben
• MPI on pople
• MPI on salk

Notes on MPICH on the Opteron cluster

Versions 1.2.4 and 2.0.1 are installed. Type module avail to see which version is appropriate for your use. MPICH versions as installed are specific to a compiler (gnu, intel, pgi) and that will be obvious from the module name. Some versions are elan-enabled, and that is also obvious from the module name.

Load the appropriate module with module load mpich/version. See the opteron document for the compilation commands.

See also:

• The MPI Home Page
• Information on various implementations of MPI
• MPI Reference Card (Postscript)


• MPICH1 home page
• MPICH2 home page
• MPICH man pages
  
• Other installed at PSC.