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 | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
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
- 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, usecvs -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 mpich2allTo checkout a particular release, specify the release name on the checkout:
cvs -d /home/MPI/cvsMaster co -r MPICH2_1_0 mpich2allNote 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 theconfigure
scripts and the C++ and Fortran 77 language bindings. To build these, run
maint/updatefilesOccasionally 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/updatefilesThe 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 bymaint/updatefiles
(this is the default for the development version but not the a release distribution).
make dependenciesafter 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 aconfigure.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_configureYou can use multiple
-do
arguments. For example, to rebuild the
Makefile.in
files and the
configure
files, use
maint/updatefiles -do=build_configure -do=makefilesCheck 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 thempich2-web
module:
cvs -d /home/MPI/cvsMaster co mpich2-webTo 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-pageswhich will install the pages into the directory
testhome
. To install the pages into the MCS web site, use
make installTo 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 withmake 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.