#Hello MPI!
The first stage is to write a small MPI program. Choose from C, C++ or Fortran to write the program hello_mpi. Once you have written and compiled hello_mpi return to this page.
Now that you have the compiled the hello_mpi executable, the next step is to run it. The way to run the executable is the same regardless of the programming language used to produce it. You need to run the program using a wrapper program called mpirun. The MPI library that you are using will provide its own implementation of mpirun, together with its own options. You should make sure that you use the mpirun executable that is associated with the MPI library with which you compiled the program.
To run the program you type;
mpirun hello_mpiThis runs your program as a single process on the computer you are using. If you want to run your program using multiple processes, then type;
mpirun -np 4 hello_mpiThe option -np 4 tells mpirun that you want to run the program as four processes. You can choose as many processes as is sensible, e.g. if you have 8 processor cores on your computer, then you may choose -np 8.
Try running the above two commands. What do you see printed to the screen? You should see the phrase Hello MPI! printed once for the first example, and four times for the second example.
In the above example, when -np 4 was used, the four copies of the program hello_mpi were run in parallel as a single program. Each copy had its own main function, and its own thread of execution. Each copy executed the same code, and so each copy printed Hello MPI! to the screen. In this example, all four copies of the program were run on the local computer. The principle advantage of MPI over a parallel programming technology such as OpenMP, is that you can run the multiple copies of the program as multiple processes over multiple computers. So, if you had four computers available, then you can set up the mpirun command such that hello_mpi is run as four processes, with one process per computer. How to set up mpirun in this way depends on the details of the specific MPI library that you are using, and is beyond the scope of this simple introductory course. Generally, this is achieved by using a file that lists the names of computers that you wish to use. Normally, the queuing system you use to submit your job to a cluster should set up this host file for you, and automatically link it to mpirun. If a host file has been set up listing four nodes, e.g.
node001
node002
node003
node004and this file has been connected to mpirun, then the command
mpirun -np 4 hello_mpiwould run hello_mpi as a single program of four processes, with the first process on computer node001, the second on node002, the third on node003 and the fourth process on node004.