Quick Start


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Here is a set of steps for setting up and minimally testing mpich. Details and instructions for a more thorough tour of mpich's features, including installing, validating, benchmarking, and using the performance evaluation tools, are given in the following sections.

    1. If you have gunzip, get mpich.tar.gz; otherwise, get mpich.tar.Z from http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/download or by anonymous ftp from ftp.mcs.anl.gov in the directory pub/mpi. (If that file is too big, try getting the pieces from pub/mpi/mpisplit and cating them together.)
    2. gunzip -c mpich.tar.gz | tar xovf -
    (or zcat mpich.tar.Z | tar xovf -)
    3. cd mpich
    4. ./configure
    This will attempt to choose an appropriate default architecture and device for you. If the defaults are not what you want, see Section Configuring mpich . Even better is to pick a directory to install mpich into and to configure mpich with that directory. For example:
        ./configure -prefix=/usr/local/mpich-1.2.1 
    
    

    5. make >& make.log
    (in C-shell syntax). This will take a while; depending on the load on your system and on your file server, it may take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more.
    6. (Optional) On workstation networks, or to run on a single workstation, edit the file mpich/util/machines/machines.xxx (where xxx is mpich's name for your machine's architecture; you will recognize it) to reflect your local host names for your workstations. If you want to, you can skip this step because by default, five copies of the machine you have built mpich on will be there to begin with. On parallel machines, this step is not needed. See the README file in the mpich/util/machines directory for a description of the format.
    7. (Optional) Build and run a simple test program:
      cd examples/basic 
    
      make cpi 
    
      ln -s ../../bin/mpirun mpirun 
    
      ./mpirun -np 4 cpi 
    
    
    At this point you have run an MPI program on your system.
    8. (Optional) Put the distribution through its complete acceptance test (See Section Thorough Testing for how to do this).
    9. (Optional) Build the rest of the MPICH environment: For the ch_p4 device, use of the secure server (see Section Faster job startup ) can speed job startup; you can build it with
       make serv_p4 
    
    
    (serv_p4 is a newer version of the P4 secure server that was part of mpich releases prior to 1.2.0.)

    The nupshot program is a faster version of upshot, but requires version 3.6 of the tk source code. If you have this package, you can build nupshot with

       make nupshot 
    
    

    10. (Optional) If you wish to install mpich in a public place so that others may use it, use
      make install 
    
    
    or
      bin/mpiinstall  
    
    
    to install mpich into the directory specified by the -prefix option to configure. Installation will consist of an include, lib, bin, sbin, www, and man directories and a small examples directory, from which users can copy and modify the Makefile. Should you wish to remove the installation, you can run the script sbin/mpiuninstall.
    11. (Optional) At this point you can announce to your users how to compile and run MPI programs, using the installation you have just built in /usr/local/mpi (or wherever you have installed it). See Section The mpich Programming Environment for commands they can use. They can also copy the Makefile in /usr/local/mpi/examples and adapt it for their own use.
In the following sections we go through these steps in more detail, and describe other aspects of the mpich distribution you might want to explore.

The companion User's Guide [9], available in compressed postscript in the doc subdirectory, gives more information on building and running MPI programs with mpich. Both the Installation Guide and the User's Guide are also available on the Web at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/docs.html.



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