Installing MPI

The standard for the implementation of parallel applications on distributed memory machines like clusters is MPI, the Message Passing Interface. In order to enable a ParaStation MPI cluster for the development and execution of MPI programs, the installation of an adapted version of MPIch2 is necessary. A corresponding RPM packet can be found within the download section of the ParaStation MPI homepage.

The corresponding package psmpi2 follows the common naming conventions of all ParaStation MPI packets.

Packages compiled on x86_64 for different distributions are available on www.par-tec.com.

After downloading the correct MPI package make sure to be root. In order to install MPIch for ParaStation MPI from the rpm file, the command

  # rpm -Uv psmpi2.5.0.0-1.i586.rpm

must be executed.

The command will extract the ParaStation MPI package to the directory /opt/parastation/mpi2.

In order to enable the MPI commands to the users make sure that the directory /opt/parastation/mpi2/bin is included into the system wide PATH environment variable. Furthermore the administrator might want to enable the MPI manual pages for all users. These pages reside in /opt/parastation/mpi2/man. Please consult the documentation of the man(1) command and the remark in the section called “Directory structure” on how to do this.

In general, all versions of ParaStation MPI supporting different compilers can be installed in parallel. The files will be copied to the directories /opt/parastation/mpi2 (for GNU gcc), /opt/parastation/mpi2-intel (for Intel compiler) or /opt/parastation/mpi2-pgi (for Portland Group compiler), depending on the compiler version supported by the MPI package.