Fall 1995 Parallel and Distributed Processing (CMSC 483/691c)

Course Information

What's new

Dec 5: Project 4 has been assigned.

Nov 30: The due date for project 3 has been extended to Tue Dec 12.

Nov 30: MPI has been reconfigured to run on up to 12 SGI workstations in ECS 230. See ~motteler/mpich/util/machines/machines.IRIX for the default list of machines available with mpirun. If you want, you can specify your own machines file with the -machines argument to mpirun, though you should probably be careful about whose machines you use. Note that you will need this same machines list in your .rhosts file, and that because of differences in exported paths, you now cannot run mpi from Retriever, though any other SGI workstation should work OK as your "host" machine. Also, if you get an error about ttys when you start mpi, it's probably because you have an stty command in your .cshrc. This is harmless, and will also happen when you use rcp or rsh; you can fix it by moving your stty commands into your .login file, where they probably belong anyway.

What's old

Nov 15: MPI now runs locally, at least for up to four processes all running on Retriever. (The problem was file systems exported from Retriever to different paths on the workstations. I think.) In any case, it is now possible to do Project 3. In the near future I'll try and get MPI running across several machines on our local network, with more processes, and also to get access to MPI running at the Maui Supercomputing center.

See the files "test.c" and "bogey.c" in "~motteler/mpitest" for some simple MPI examples, and the makefile in that directory to see how to link with the local MPI libraries. The command to run the example MPI program "bogey" as four seperate communicating processes is mpirun -np 4 bogey.

Oct 24: Exam 1 is Tue Nov 7

Oct 31: Project 2 is due by the end of today.

Oct 31: We will be doing Project 3 using MPI.

Oct 10: Project 2 has been assigned.

Sept 26: Project 1 has been assigned.

Sept 12: We have been given permission to use one of the MasPars (an 8K-processor MP-1) at NASA/GSFC; account forms will be handed out on Tuesday.