2 QUICK START 2
4. Any one of a number of Unix operating systems, such as IA32-Linux.
MPICH is most extensively tested on Linux; there remain some dif-
ficulties on systems to which we do not currently have access. Our
configure script attempts to adapt MPICH to new systems.
Configure will check for these prerequisites and try to work around defi-
ciencies if possible. (If you don’t have Fortran, you will still be able to use
MPICH, just not with Fortran applications.)
2.2 From A Standing Start to Running an MPI Program
Here are the steps from obtaining MPICH through running your own parallel
program on multiple machines.
1. Unpack the tar file.
tar xfz mpich.tar.gz
If your tar doesn’t accept the z option, use
gunzip -c mpich.tar.gz | tar xf -
Let us assume that the directory where you do this is /home/you/libraries.
It will now contain a subdirectory named mpich-3.1.
2. Choose an installation directory (the default is /usr/local/bin):
mkdir /home/you/mpich-install
It will be most convenient if this directory is shared by all of the
machines where you intend to run processes. If not, you will have to
duplicate it on the other machines after installation. Actually, if you
leave out this step, the next step will create the directory for you.
3. Choose a build directory. Building will proceed much faster if your
build directory is on a file system local to the machine on which the
configuration and compilation steps are executed. It is preferable that
this also be separate from the source directory, so that the source
directories remain clean and can be reused to build other copies on
other machines.