Another important task while spawning parallel applications in a cluster is to setup a proper environment for the newly created processes on each node.
ParaStation MPI by default exports only a limited set of environment
variables to newly spawned processes, like
HOME
,
USER
,
SHELL
or
TERM
.
In addition, each currently defined environment variable can be
exported to spawned processes by adding the variable name to
the special ParaStation MPI variable PSI_EXPORTS
.
E.g., within a Bourne shell (or look alike), the commands
$ PSI_EXPORTS=Variable1
,Variable2
,... $ export PSI_EXPORTS
will export the variables Variable1
and
Variable2
to all processes.
Accordingly, for a csh based environment, the
command
$ setenv PSI_EXPORTSVariable1
,Variable2
,...
will export this variables to all subsequent parallel tasks.
Beside these variables, additional variables might be
inherently set for remote processes by the
inetd(8)
, e.g. PATH
or HOSTNAME
.
Beside defining environment variables, mpiexec may be used to export variables. E.g.
$ mpiexec -Evar
content
...
may be used to propagate the variable
var
to all processes.
Refer to mpiexec(1) for more details.
For a complete list of environment variables automatically exported by ParaStation MPI, refer to ps_environment(7).