Libraries

In addition, a couple of libraries providing communication and management functionality, must be installed. All libraries are provided as static versions, which will be linked to the application at compile time, or as shared (dynamic) versions, which are pre-linked at compile time and folded in at runtime. There is also a set of management and test tools installed on the cluster.

ParaStation MPI comes with it's own version of MPI, based on MPIch2. The MPI library provides standard MPIch2 compatible MPI functions. For communication purposes, it supports a couple of communication paths in parallel, e.g. local communication using Shared memory, TCP or p4sock, Ethernet using p4sock and TCP, InfiniBand using verbs, Myrinet using GM or 10G Ethernet using DAPL. Thus, ParaStation MPI is able to spawn parallel tasks across nodes connected by different communication networks. ParaStation MPI will also make use of redundant interconnects, if a failure is encountered during startup of a parallel task.

There are different versions of the ParaStation MPI library available, depending on the compiler in use. In particular, versions for the GCC, Intel and Portland Group are available. The versions support all available languages and language options for the selected compiler, e.g. Fortran, Fortran90, C or C++. The different versions of the MPI library can be installed in parallel, thus it is possible to compile and run applications using different compilers at the same node.