25.01.2008 10:10

I have Ubuntu 7.10 (64bit) now running on my desktop computer at the University (see previous posting). I first tried to set up openMPI with the package that is in the Ubuntu repositories (openmpi-bin). That didn't work. It installs but then mpicc and mpirun just don't do anything, they seem to be empty. So I removed it and did a manual install which is straightforward.

• Download the tar.gz from here.
• Unpack and untar it. Then simply proceed as in the INSTALL file for "User build". I installed in /opt/openmpi, so I run
  cd /pathtosource/openmpi-1.2.5
  sudo ./configure --prefix /opt/openmpi
  sudo make all install
  
• add system links to mpicc and mpirun:
  sudo ln -s /opt/openmpi/bin/mpicc /usr/bin/mpicc
  sudo ln -s /opt/openmpi/bin/mpirun /usr/bin/mpirun
  

Piece of cake. On my old system I used MPICH and I must say, the one good thing about openMPI I realized so far is: error messages are much clearer and much more useful. And that's worth a kingdom in a parallel code! And openMPI properly cleans up all processes when you manually kill a job. So you don't have to do this hand.