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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(serv_p4 is a newer version of the P4 secure server that was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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Next: Obtaining and Unpacking the Distribution