MPI
More Information

This document presents "more information" about MPI. It is intended to be referred to after you've read MPI - an introduction.

There is an excellent MPI tutorial available from NCSA. A copy is available at mpi_course.pdf. To get the full benefit of the course, including access to the example programs, you need to do a free registration at their CI-Tutor site: http://ci-tutor.ncsa.uiuc.edu/login.php.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center has an MPI tutorial available at http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/help/tutorials/mpi/intro

The web site for Open MPI, an open source implementation of MPI-2 (the most recent version of MPI), is at: http://www.open-mpi.org/ This web site provides downloadable software, documentation, and test codes.

Argonne National Laboratory maintains an MPI web site at: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/

Selected references

MIT Press publishes a set of reference books on MPI, but these may be too much for the beginner. The following book is likely to be at the appropriate level:

William Gropp, Ewing Lusk, Anthony Skjellum,
Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message-Passing Interface,
Second Edition,
MIT Press, 1999,
ISBN: 0262571323,
LC: QA76.642.G76.

The book by Openshaw and Turton includes much information on the issues commonly faced when solving common scientific problems using MPI.

Stan Openshaw, Ian Turton,
High Performance Computing and the Art of Parallel Programming: an Introduction for Geographers, Social Scientists, and Engineers,
Routledge, 2000,
ISBN: 0415156920,
LC: QA76.88.O64.

The book by Pacheco is a thorough discussion of the programming issues involved in using MPI, including I/O and debugging and the use of auxilliary libraries like PETSc and SCALAPACK.

Peter Pacheco,
Parallel Programming with MPI,
Morgan Kaufman, 1996,
ISBN: 1558603395,
LC: QA76.642.P3.

Some local examples

The document "Using MPI on System X" discusses some of the issues involved in starting with an MPI source code on your home machine which must be transferred to Virginia Tech's System X, compiled, run, and the output retrieved. This file is available as http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/html/using_mpi_sysx.html,

I have prepared some directories containing sample MPI programs, examples of running MPI on Virginia Tech's System X, and also a "stub" library of dummy MPI routines for use on a single processor. These examples are available in several "flavors" of programming language:

C Examples:

• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/c_src/mpi/mpi.html, the text of some simple MPI programs written in C;
• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/c_src/mpi_sysx/mpi_sysx.html, the job control and output files from running MPI jobs running C programs at Virginia Tech on the System X cluster.
• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/c_src/mpi_stubs/mpi_stubs.html, the C source code for a "stub" library, that is, a dummy version of the MPI library that can be used to build executable code (which only runs on one processor).

C++ Examples:

• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/cpp_src/mpi/mpi.html, the text of some simple MPI programs written in C++;
• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/cpp_src/mpi_sysx/mpi_sysx.html, the job control and output files from running MPI jobs running C++ programs at Virginia Tech on the System X cluster.
• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/cpp_src/mpi_stubs/mpi_stubs.html, the C++ source code for a "stub" library, that is, a dummy version of the MPI library that can be used to build executable code (which only runs on one processor). (This C++ code is only a "skeleton" version right now.)

FORTRAN77 Examples:

• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/f77_src/mpi/mpi.html, the text of some simple MPI programs written in F77;
• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/f77_src/mpi_sysx/mpi_sysx.html, the job control and output files from running MPI jobs running F77 programs at Virginia Tech on the System X cluster.
• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/f77_src/mpi_stubs/mpi_stubs.html, the F77 source code for a "stub" library, that is, a dummy version of the MPI library that can be used to build executable code (which only runs on one processor).

FORTRAN90 Examples:

• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/f_src/mpi/mpi.html, the text of some simple MPI programs written in F90;
• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/f_src/mpi_sysx/mpi_sysx.html, the job control and output files from running MPI jobs running F90 programs at Virginia Tech on the System X cluster.
• http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/f_src/mpi_stubs/mpi_stubs.html, the F90 source code for a "stub" library, that is, a dummy version of the MPI library that can be used to build executable code (which only runs on one processor).

References:

1. William Gropp, Steven Huss-Lederman, Andrew Lumsdaine, Ewing Lusk, Bill Nitzberg, William Saphir, Marc Snir,
   MPI: The Complete Reference,
   Volume II: The MPI-2 Extensions,
   Second Edition,
   MIT Press, 1998,
   ISBN13: 978-0-262-57123-4,
   LC: QA76.642.M65.
2. William Gropp, Ewing Lusk, Anthony Skjellum,
   Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message-Passing Interface,
   Second Edition,
   MIT Press, 1999,
   ISBN: 0262571323,
   LC: QA76.642.G76.
3. William Gropp, Ewing Lusk, Rajiv Thakur,
   Using MPI-2: Advanced Features of the Message-Passing Interface,
   Second Edition,
   MIT Press, 1999,
   ISBN: 0262571331,
   LC: QA76.642.G762.
4. Stan Openshaw, Ian Turton,
   High Performance Computing and the Art of Parallel Programming: an Introduction for Geographers, Social Scientists, and Engineers,
   Routledge, 2000,
   ISBN: 0415156920,
   LC: QA76.88.O64.
5. Peter Pacheco,
   Parallel Programming with MPI,
   Morgan Kaufman, 1996,
   ISBN: 1558603395,
   LC: QA76.642.P3.
6. Sudarshan Raghunathan,
   Making a Supercomputer Do What You Want: High Level Tools for Parallel Programming,
   Computing in Science and Engineering,
   Volume 8, Number 5, September/October 2006, pages 70-80.
7. Marc Snir, Steve Otto, Steven Huss-Lederman, David Walker, Jack Dongarra,
   MPI: The Complete Reference,
   Volume I: The MPI Core,
   Second Edition,
   MIT Press, 1998,
   ISBN: 0-262-69216-3,
   LC: QA76.642.M65.
8. Scott Vetter, Yukiya Aoyama, Jun Nakano,
   RS/600 SP: Practical MPI Programming,
   IBM Redbooks, 1999,
   ISBN: 0738413658.

Copies of the MPI and MPI-2 standards are available online from the MPI Forum, at
http://www.mpi-forum.org/

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