News & Announcements
MPICH2 now available on Biowulf (Biowulf)
Date: 20 October 2008From: steven fellini (sfellini@NIH.GOV)
This message is for Biowulf users who use the MPI message passing libraries for compiling parallel applications. MPICH2, developed at Argonne National Labs, is now available on the NIH Biowulf cluster and replaces MPICH1 as the preferred MPI library for parallel applications running over Ethernet (Note that MPICH1 remains the library for use with Myrinet and Infiniband networks). This new implementation will be supported across all compiler suites currently available on Biowulf (GNU, PGI, Intel and PathScale). See http://biowulf.nih.gov/development.html#mpi for information on compiling code against MPICH2. In addition to implementing features of the MPI-2 standard, MPICH2 uses a highly scalable process initiation mechanism which replaces 'mpirun'. This results in much faster parallel job startup times, especially for larger numbers of processes. See http://biowulf.nih.gov/user_guide.html#parallel for information on starting up parallel applications built with MPICH2. Applications that were built with MPICH1 will continue to run without any changes. See http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/mpich2 for more about MPICH2.