Quick Start


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Here is a set of steps for setting up and minimally testing mpich. Details and instructions for a more thorough tour of mpich's features, including installing, validating, benchmarking, and using the performance evaluation tools, are given in the following sections.

    1. If you have gunzip, get mpich.tar.gz; otherwise, get mpich.tar.Z by anonymous ftp from info.mcs.anl.gov in the directory pub/mpi. (If that file is too big, try getting the pieces from pub/mpi/mpisplit and cating them together.)
    2. gunzip -c mpich.tar | tar xovf - or zcat mpich.tar.Z | tar xovf -
    3. cd mpich
    4. configure This will attempt to choose an appropriate default architecture and ``device'' for you. If the defaults are not what you want, see Section Configuring  mpich
    5. make >& make.log (in C-shell syntax). This will take awhile; depending on the load on your system and on your file server, it may take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more.
    6. (Optional) On workstation networks, or to run on a single workstation, edit the file mpich/util/machines/machines.sample to reflect your local host names for your workstations. On parallel machines, this step is not needed. See the README file in the mpich/util/machines directory for a description of the format. If you skip this step, configure will build a default `` machines'' file consisting of multiple entries for the machine that you are configuring on.
    7. Build and run a simple test program: 
    cd examples/basic 
make cpi 
mpirun -np 4 cpi
    At this point you have run an MPI program on your system.
    8. (Optional) Put the distribution through its complete acceptance test (See Section Thorough Testing for how to do this.
    9. (Optional) If you wish to install mpich in a public place so that others may use it, use 
    \code{make PREFIX=/usr/local/mpi install}
    to install mpich into /usr/local/mpi, for example. Installation will consist of an include and lib directory and a small examples directory, from which users can copy and modify the Makefile. Should you wish to remove the installation, you can run the script mpiuninstall in the bin directory.
    10. (Optional) Build the rest of the MPICH environment: For the ch_p4 device, use of the secure server (see Section Faster job startup ) can speed job startup; you can build it with 
    make serv_p4
    or 
    make server
    server is a newer version of the secure server that is compatible with serv_p4. In addition, it supports the ch_nexus device. This version of the server will become the default version in a few more releases.

    The nupshot program is a faster version of upshot, but requires tk source code. If you have this package, you can build nupshot with 

    make nupshot

    11. (Optional) At this point you can announce to your users how to compile and run MPI programs, using the installation you have just built in /usr/local/mpi (or wherever you have installed it). See Section The  mpich Programming Environment for commands they can use. They can also copy the Makefile in /usr/local/mpi and adapt it for their own use.
In the following sections we go through these steps in more detail, and describe other aspects of the mpich distribution you might want to explore.

The companion User's Guide [5] gives more information on building and running MPI programs with mpich.


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