MPI is simply a standard which others follow in their implementation. Because of this, there are a wide variety of MPI implementations out there. One of the most popular implementations, MPICH2, will be used for all of the examples provided through this site. Users are free to use any implementation they wish, but only instructions for installing MPICH2 will be provided. Furthermore, the scripts and code provided for the lessons are only guaranteed to execute and run with the lastest version of MPICH2.
MPICH2 is a widely-used implementation of MPI that is developed primarily by Argonne National Laboratory in the United States. The main reason for choosing MPICH2 over other implementations is simply because of my familiarity with the interface and because of my close relationship with Argonne National Laboratory. I also encourage others to check out OpenMPI, which is also a widely-used implementation.
Installing MPICH2
The latest version of MPICH2 is available here. The version that I will be using for all of the examples on the site is 1.4, which was released June 16, 2011. Go ahead and download the source code, uncompress the folder, and change into the MPICH2 directory.
Once doing this, you should be able to configure your installation by performing ./configure. I added a couple of parameters to my configuration to avoid building the MPI Fortran library. If you need to install MPICH2 to a local directory (for example, if you don’t have root access to your machine), type ./configure --prefix=/installation/directory/path For more information about possible configuration parameters, type ./configure --help
When configuration is done, it should say “Configuration completed.” Once this is through, it is time to build and install MPICH2 with make; sudo make install.
If your build was successful, you should be able to type mpich2version and see something similar to this.
Hopefully your build finished successfully. If not, you may have issues with missing dependencies. For any issue, I highly recommend copying and pasting the error message directly into Google.
Running an MPI Program
Now that you have installed MPICH, whether it’s on your local machine or cluster, it is time to run a simple application. The MPI Hello World lesson goes over the basics of an MPI program, along with a guide on how to run MPICH2 for the first time.
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Seems this installation is just for one CPU or one machine, what do i do if i want to install MPI on a cluster with many nodes?
Have you tried running the hello world application? This installation process should work for many different types of clusters. You will just have to make sure that you can successfully SSH into other nodes without a password prompt. In the hello world tutorial, I show how to run it on a set of Linux boxes connected through ethernet.
I tried ./configure command specifying teh directory but it shows an error –
Permission denied
how can I solve this??
Hello Ananya, do you have the permissions to the install directory? Did you use the “–prefix” tag when specifying the directory?
greetings,
I have tried to install mpi4py on python v3.2 consedering as system Windows Vista, so the build and install commands were correctly performed, but i had every once the following message:
error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat
Thank you in advance.
Hello Amila, unfortunately I have never installed MPI on a Windows system. I found this link that might help you out http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2817869/error-unable-to-find-vcvarsall-bat
I want installing mpich2 on vs(c++) and write a program
(i use win7)
Unfortunately I have never used win7. Have you ever used Cygwin? If I can get hold of a windows machine, I’ll try to install it and post how to on here.
Hello,
I want to know about the installation and running of MPICH2 on the windows operated system.
Hello, I have never installed MPICH2 on a windows machine. I assume that you will have to use Cygwin and then install MPICH2 using that. Have you used Cygwin before?
No, I have never used Cygwin. Please tell how to use it.