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4 The Ammasso MPI Library
4.1 Overview
MPICH is a portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard.
Currently the Ammasso 1100 supplies and supports the MPICH version 1.2.5 of MPI from
Argonne National Labs. The Ammasso MPICH implementation is a fully supported port of
MPICH over Ammasso’s RNIC verbs interface designed to take advantage of the Ammasso
1100’s low latency and high throughput. Additional information, full documentation, and
manual pages for MPICH are available on the MPICH web site at:
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/
Note that other MPI implementations have been qualified and tested to run over top of the
Ammasso RNIC exploiting the advantages it provides. See the specific MPI vendor’s web
site as well as Ammasso’ support web site for details on those implementations.
The following section provides some basic information about leveraging the Ammasso
adapter with your MPI application using the Ammasso MPI implementation. Installation,
configuration, and tuning examples are supplied. The information provided is for reference,
as there may be multiple ways to accomplish these tasks, depending on each development
environment.
4.1.1 Compiler Support
The Ammasso 1100 is designed to work with the standard compiler suites available in the
Linux community. We have tested our MPI implementation with the GNU C and the F77
suites that are bundled with the traditional Linux distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE.
We have also tested our MPI implementation with the Intel Version 7x and 8x C/C++ and
F90 suites. As we progress, other compilers may be added to our test suite. Please see the
Ammasso support web site for details and specifics.
4.2 Installation
NOTE: In order to compile the Ammasso 1100 MPICH 1.2.5 Package, the AMSO1100
package must be installed and built. If you are updating from a previous release, please see
the HOWTO_UPDATE.txt file for information on removing software from previous releases.
1. Unarchive the files in
AMSO_MPICH.tgz
into a working directory with:
# cd <work_dir>
# tar -zxf <path_to>/AMSO_MPICH.tgz
2. Change into the
AMSO_MPICH
directory, build Ammasso’s MPICH implementation, and
capture the output to a logfile with:
# cd ./AMSO_MPICH
# make install 2>&1 | tee make_install.logfile
3. Answer the configure questions for your specific needs. Below is a description of the
questions asked.