MPICH2

MPICH2

MPICH2 is an implementation of the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). The goals of MPICH2 are to provide an MPI implementation for important platforms, including clusters, SMPs, and massively parallel processors. It also provides a vehicle for MPI implementation research and for developing new and better parallel programming environments (see the list of available student projects).

MPICH2 was awarded an R&D100 award in 2005.

The current version of MPICH2 is 1.0.5p4, released on December 13, 2006, patch 4 March 30, 2007. (The latest patch release has some minor changes for MPICH2 to work better with the TotalView debugger.) MPICH2 replaces MPICH1 and should be used instead of MPICH1 except for the case of clusters with heterogeneous data representations (e.g., different lengths for integers or different byte ordering). MPICH2 does not yet support those systems (support is planned for 2007).

MPICH2 is distributed as source (with an open-source, freely available license). It has been tested on several platforms, including Linux (on IA32 and x86-64), Mac OS/X (PowerPC and Intel), Solaris (32- and 64-bit), and Windows. Please see the README, CHANGES, and RELEASE_NOTES files in the distribution for more details.

For MPICH2-based MPI implementations on other networks and platforms, such as InfiniBand and Windows, see Related Projects below.

Download MPICH2

MPICH2 is provided in source form as a single, gzip'ed tar file. This is a unified source distribution, and may be used for both UNIX and Microsoft Windows. Binary distributions for Microsoft Windows are also provided.

Platform	Download			Size	Version
All (source)	mpich2-1.0.5p4.tar.gz	http	ftp	12.8 MB	1.0.5p4
Win32 IA32	mpich2-1.0.5p2-win32-ia32.msi	http	ftp	8 MB	1.0.5p2
Win64 EM64T/AMD64	mpich2-1.0.5p2-win64-x86-64.zip	http	ftp	6.4 MB	1.0.5p2
Win64 IA64	mpich2-1.0.3-1-win64-ia64.zip	http	ftp	12.1 MB	1.0.3

In addition to the distributions provided by the MPICH2 Development Team, distributions of MPICH2 for other operating systems and packing environments are available below. Many thanks go out to those individuals who have graciously contributed their time and energy to create these distributions.

Platform	Author(s)	Email Address	Download	Version
Debian	Zach Lowry	zach@zachlowry.net	http	1.0.3
FreeBSD	Thierry Thomas	thierry@FreeBSD.org	http (info)	1.0.4
Slackware	Marcelo Souza	marcelo@cebacad.net	http (info)	1.0.4p1
Fedora	Deji Akingunola	dakingun@gmail.com	http (info)	1.0.4p1

Documentation

Document	HTML		PDF
User's Guide	N/A	N/A	http	ftp
Installer's Guide	N/A	N/A	http	ftp
Windows Developer's Guide	N/A	N/A	http	ftp
README	http	ftp	N/A	N/A
CHANGES	http	ftp	N/A	N/A
RELEASE_NOTES	http	ftp	N/A	N/A
Change Summary	http	N/A	N/A	N/A

Help on Installing and Using MPICH2

If you have trouble installing or using MPICH2, first see the FAQ page. If you have trouble with the Windows version of MPICH2, see the tips for installing and running MPICH2 on Windows provided by a user, Brent Paul, or see the MPICH2 Windows Development Guide. If you still have any questions, comments, or difficulties, please contact us at mpich2-maint@mcs.anl.gov.

An MPICH mailing list is available for discussion of the MPICH implementation of MPI.

Information for Developers

Information for developers, including the state of the current development version and information on the tools and procedures used to manage MPICH2 development.

Related Projects

Two goals of MPICH2 are to enable research into MPI implementations and to encourage the development of MPI implementations for other platforms. Some of these projects are listed below.

Vendor MPIs

Various vendor MPIs are derived from MPICH2. Examples include IBM's MPI for the BG/L, Cray's MPI for the Red Storm and XT-3, Microsoft MPI, and Intel MPI.

MVAPICH2 for InfiniBand

MVAPICH2 is a high performance implementation of MPICH2 for the InfiniBand interconnect. This implementation is developed at the Ohio State University.

MPICH2 over SCTP

Brad Penoff and Mike Tsai from the University of British Columbia have developed an implementation of MPICH2 over SCTP. (SCTP is a message-oriented reliable transport protocol recently standardized by the IETF and designed to bridge the gap between UDP and TCP.) Their implementation, an SCTP channel for MPICH2's ch3 device, is included in the MPICH2 1.0.5 release. Further information on their work is available here.

Another implementation of MPICH2 (1.0.3) over SCTP was developed at Università degli Studi del Molise in Italy. Information on their work is available here.

DeinoMPI for Windows

DeinoMPI is an implementation of MPI-2 for Microsoft Windows. It is derived from MPICH2 1.0.4.

Chemnitz InfiniBand

MPICH2-CH3 Device for InfiniBand is based on the Verbs interface, currently using the Mellanox Verbs implementation VAPI. This implementation is developed at Technische Universität Chemnitz.

ATOLL

ATOLL is a high-performance interconnect and has an MPI based on MPICH2.

 

Information for Developers

Getting and building MPICH2

Checking out the MPICH2 source

Setting up the build environment

Coding Standards for MPICH2

Enabling automatic handling of file dependencies

Updated derived files such as configure

Using CVS branches to manage patches and code development

Testing MPICH

MPICH2 Status and ToDo List

Using the MPI test suites with MPICH2

Details on using the test suites

Changing the default tests

Location of test output

Running the special tests

Running the tests of configure options

Running the coding checks

Running the global sysmbol checks

Running and understanding the coverage tests

Writing New Tests

Running Tests on Remote Machines

Description of MPICH group machine zoo

Interfacing to MPICH2

This section contains information on interfacing to MPICH2, either with external tools such as debuggers and process managers, or by replacing functions within the MPI implmentation, such as specifying a different implementation of an MPI collective operation.

Debugger Interface Overview (coming soon)

Support for Message Queue Access from within a Debugger

Replacing collective routines (coming soon)

Replacing topology routines (coming soon)

Using other process managers with MPICH2 (incomplete)

Miscellaneous

Fixing Bugs in the Current Release

Rules for Installation Targets

Updating the error messages

Creating a Release

Updating the MPICH2 Web Pages

Updating the MPICH2 FAQ

Design Documents

Possible extensions to mpiexec, such as a standard set of command-line options for environment variables and support for multithreaded applications.

Checking out the MPICH2 source

To checkout a new copy of the MPICH2 source on systems with access to the MCS filesystems, use

    cvs -d /home/MPI/cvsMaster co mpich2all

(If you have trouble with the confdb module within MPICH2, checkout mpich2allnoconfdb instead of mpich2all). From external sites (including machines within MCS that do not mount the division file systems), use

    setenv CVS_RSH ssh
cvs -d :ext:shakey:/home/MPI/cvsMaster co mpich2all

To checkout a particular release, specify the release name on the checkout:

    cvs -d /home/MPI/cvsMaster co -r MPICH2_1_0 mpich2all

Note that checking out a particular release name creates a branch (see Managing and Using Branches).

Setting up the build environment

The CVS repository does not contain any of the "derived" files, including the configure scripts and the C++ and Fortran 77 language bindings. To build these, run

    maint/updatefiles

Occasionally changes are made to the autoconf macros that are not detected by the dependency tests for the configure scripts. It is always correct to delete all of the configure scripts before running maint/updatefiles:

    find . -name configure -print | xargs rm
maint/updatefiles

The autoconf macros and the configure.in scripts now require autoconf version 2.59. This was done because there are incompatible differences between each minor release of autoconf (even the allowed command line arguments has changed between 2.50 and 2.58).

You can select a particular version of autoconf and autoheader by using the environment variables AUTOCONF and AUTOHEADER respectively. maint/updatefiles will use these if they are set.

Enabling automatic handling of file dependencies

Under certain circumstances, the build system will automatically maintain dependency information, ensuring that changes to a header file, for example, forces the recompilation of all files that include that header file. The requirements are

• The C compiler is gcc, and
• Dependencies are enabled when simplemake was run by maint/updatefiles (this is the default for the development version but not the a release distribution).

To enable the dependencies, simply run

    make dependencies

after the configure step. This will enable dependency handling for the parts of MPICH2 that use simplemake (e.g., src/mpi, src/mpid, and some parts of src/util). Other parts of MPICH2, such as ROMIO, do not currently support automatic dependency handling.

Updated derived files such as configure

If you change one of the files that is the source for a derived file, such as a configure.in file, you will need to rebuild the derived file (e.g., the corresponding configure file). The safest way to do this is to rerun updatefiles:

     maint/updatefiles

(from the top-level MPICH2 directory). However, this can take a fair amount of time. You can direct updatefiles to only update certain classes of files. For example, to update all configure files, use

    maint/updatefiles -do=build_configure

You can use multiple -do arguments. For example, to rebuild the Makefile.in files and the configure files, use

    maint/updatefiles -do=build_configure -do=makefiles

Check the source of maint/updatefiles to see what other options are available for -do.

Updating the MPICH2 Web Pages

The MPICH2 web site is managed under CVS. To update the web site, first checkout the mpich2-web module:

   cvs -d /home/MPI/cvsMaster co mpich2-web

To maintain a uniform look to the web pages, including the menu sidebars, each web page is created from a text file. For example, the main page is created from m.txt. This page created from developer.txt. To make the web pages, simply execute make. To test the pages, use

    make test-pages

which will install the pages into the directory testhome. To install the pages into the MCS web site, use

    make install

To add a new page, look at the Makefile and add the necessary commands. Make sure that the DIRS and MAINPAGES variables list the source directory and files.

Updating the MPICH2 FAQ Pages

The MPICH2 FAQ is maintained from a single file, faq.txt, in the directory mpich2/docs/faq. This source file uses a simplified form of LaTeX for formatting; the script faqbuild, which is run by using make in the docs/faq directory, will build three forms of the FAQ:

HTML

A single file, faq.htm, which is copied to the MPICH2 web site with make install-web

Text

A collection of files, all with extension .txt, that contain one FAQ item. These may be used with the REQ system

LaTeX

A single file, faq.tex, which is normally processed to produce a PDF file.