mpi(1)

NAME

MPI - Introduction to the Message-Passing Interface

DESCRIPTION

MPI stands for Message Passing Interface. The goal of MPI,

simply stated, is to develop a widely used standard for writing

message-passing programs. As such the interface should establish

a practical, portable, efficient, and flexible standard for mes

sage passing.

In designing MPI the MPI Forum sought to make use of the

most attractive features of a number of existing message passing

systems, rather than selecting one of them and adopting it as the

standard. Thus, MPI has been strongly influenced by work at the

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Intel s NX/2, Express, nCUBE s

Vertex, p4, and PARMACS. Other important contributions have come

from Zipcode, Chimp, PVM, Chameleon, and PICL.

MPI is a specification (like C or Fortran) and there are a

number of implementations. The rest of this man page describes

the use of the MPICH implementation of MPI.

GETTING STARTED

Add MPI to your path
% set path = ( $path /usr/local/mpi/bin )

Compute pi to a given resolution on 8 processors or

threads
% mpirun -np 8 /usr/local/mpi/examples/basic/fpi

Try 10000 intervals at the prompt. Fortran source is

available in this directory, along with a similar C program

(cpi.c).

A coarse timing program is also available here
% mpirun -np 8 /usr/local/mpi/examples/basic/systest

More sophisticated timing programs may be found in the

source for the MPICH implementation of MPI (/home/MPI/mpich/exam

ples/perftest).

You can compile and link your own MPI programs with the

commands mpicc and mpif77 .

% mpicc -o cpi cpi.c
% mpif77 -o fpi fpi.f

DOCUMENTATION

Postscript documentation can be found in directory

/usr/local/mpi/doc/. These include an introductory guide

(guide.ps) and a user manual (manual.ps).

Man pages exist for every MPI subroutine and function.

The command mpiman will start an xman for the MPI manual pages.

The man pages are also available on the Web at

http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/www .

Additional on-line information is available at

http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi , including a hypertext version of the

standard, information on other libraries that use MPI, and point

ers to other MPI resources.

VERSION

MPICH version 1.1.2

LICENSE

Copyright 1993-1998 University of Chicago and Mississippi

State University. See COPYRIGHT for details. The source code is

freely available by anonymous ftp from ftp.mcs.anl.gov in

pub/mpi/mpich.tar.gz .

FILES

/usr/local/mpi/ MPI software directory
/usr/local/mpi/COPYRIGHT Copyright notice
/usr/local/mpi/README various notes and instruc

tions
/usr/local/mpi/bin/ binaries, including mpirun
/usr/local/mpi/examples/basic elementary MPI programs
/usr/local/mpi/doc/ documentation
/usr/local/mpi/include/ include files
/usr/local/mpi/lib/ library files

CONTACT

For comments regarding the local installation of MPI,

please send mail to support@mcs.anl.gov. MPI-specific sugges

tions and bug reports should be sent directly to mpi

bugs@mcs.anl.gov.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thanks to Richard Frost for suggesting this page and pro

viding a sample.

LOCATION

/home/MPI/mansrc/manpage

1/26/1999

MPI(1)