Installing mpich for Others to Use


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This step is optional. However, if you are installing mpich, you should make sure that you specified the directory into which mpich is to be installed when you configure mpich by using the -prefix option. For example, if you plan to install mpich into /usr/local/mpich-1.2.1, then you should configure with the option -prefix=/usr/local/mpich-1.2.1. If there is any possibility at all that you will build mpich for several systems and/or devices, you should include that information in the prefix. For example, by using -prefix=/usr/local/mpich-1.2.1/solaris/ch_p4, you can later add -prefix=/usr/local/mpich-1.2.1/solaris/ch_p4smp for a version that is built with the configure option -comm=shared (suitable for clusters of symmetric multiprocessors, hence the ``smp'' in the directory name). Once you have tested all parts of the MPI distribution (including the tools, particularly upshot and/or nupshot), you may install mpich into a publically available directory, and disseminate information for other users, so that everyone can use the shared installation. To install the libraries and include files in a publicly available place, change to the top-level mpich directory, and do

    make install 

The man pages will have been copied with the installation, so you might want to add /usr/local/mpich-1.2.1/man to the default system MANPATH. The man pages can be conveniently browsed with the mpiman command, found in the mpich/bin directory.

It is possible to specify the directory into which mpich should be installed after building mpich by setting the value of PREFIX when executing the installation step:

    make install PREFIX=/usr/local/mpich-1.2.1 

However, some features, particularly the ability of Totalview to show mpich message queues, will work only if mpich is configured with the prefix set to the installation directory.

A good way to handle multiple releases of mpich is to install them into directories whose names include the version number and then set a link from mpi to that directory. For example, if the current version is 1.2.1, the installation commands to install into /usr/local are

    make install PREFIX=/usr/local/mpi-1.2.1 

    rm /usr/local/mpi 

    ln -s /usr/local/mpi-1.2.1 /usr/local/mpi 

The script bin/mpiinstall provides more control over the installation of mpich (in fact, make install just runs this script). For example, you can change the protection of the files when they are installed with the options -mode=nnnn (for regular files) and -xmode=nnnn (for executables and directories). You can set the directory into which the man pages will be placed with -manpath=<path>. The option -help shows the full set of options for mpiinstall.

Installing nupshot can sometimes be troublesome. You can use the switch -nonupshot to mpiinstall to not install nupshot; alternately, you can use the switch -cpnuphost to install the copy in mpich/profiling/nupshot. Normally, mpiinstall builds a new version of nupshot to insure that all of the paths are correct (nupshot needs to find files where it is installed). If you need to ``manually'' build nupshot for installation, the -cpnupshot switch will allow you to install that version.

You can test the installation by using the configure in mpich/examples/test. For example, if you have installed MPICH into /usr/local/mpich for architecture solaris and device ch_p4, execute

  ./configure -mpichpath=/usr/local/mpich-1.2.1/solaris/ch_p4/bin -mpi2 

  make testing 

(the -mpi2 switch causes MPI-2 functions that are part of mpich to also be tested; the test codes in the mpich/examples/test directory may be used with any implementation of MPI, not just the mpich implementation.



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