Options for running MPI programs #

For the larger parallel runs in the course, and benchmarking, we will use the Hamilton cluster. You may wish to do development on your own machine. I provide some brief guidance on what you need in terms of appropriate compilers and MPI implementations.

Hamilton access and quickstart #

If you don’t already have an account on Hamilton, please register for one by following their instructions.

When requesting an account, please put “Lawrence Mitchell” as the approver, and mention that the access is for the Computer Science course COMP4187.

We’ll learn more on how to use Hamilton by doing the various exercises, but you may wish to look at this brief quickstart guide.

MacOS #

I recommend homebrew for installing packages on MacOS. You will need an MPI implementation, for which I recommend mpich, which can be obtained with

$ brew install mpich

This will also set up the necessary C compilers (the Apple toolchain provides these via clang).

Linux-based systems #

On Debian-based systems you’ll need the following apt packages

build-essential
libmpich-dev
mpich
gcc

Windows #

Microsoft provides an MPI implementation called MS-MPI, but I have no experience of it, or development on Windows. I recommend using WSL and then following the instructions for Debian-based systems above.

Python interface to MPI #

Having installed the MPI and compiler toolchain, it is also possible to install Python bindings to MPI, called mpi4py.

I recommend doing it in a virtual environment and then you can use

pip install mpi4py

(Or your other favourite python package manager).