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In This Section
Prerequisites
To develop parallel programs using MPI.NET, you will need several
other tools. Note that you do not need to have a Windows
cluster or even a multi-core/multi-processor workstation to develop
MPI programs: any desktop machine that can run Windows XP can be
used to develop MPI programs with MPI.NET.
- Microsoft
Visual Studio 2005 (or newer), including Microsoft Visual
C#: we will be writing all of our examples
in C#, although
MPI.NET can be used from any .NET language.
- MS-MPI: MPI.NET is built on Microsoft's implementation of the
Message Passing Interface. There are actually two different ways
to get MS-MPI (you only need to do one of these):
- Windows
Installer: most Windows users will already have this program,
which is used to install programs on Microsoft Windows.
Install MPI.NET SDK
To develop programs for MPI.NET, you will need the MPI.NET
software development kit, which you can download from
the MPI.NET download page. Execute the
installer to install the MPI.NET Software Development Kit.
Ping? Pong! Running an MPI program
Once the MPI.NET SDK has been installed, it's time to run our
first MPI program. Open up a Command Prompt and navigate to
the location where you installed the MPI.NET SDK. You should type what is shown in red.
C:\>cd "C:\Program Files\MPI.NET"
Then, execute the program PingPong.exe:
C:\Program Files\MPI.NET>PingPong.exe
Rank 0 is alive and running on jeltz
Here, we have executed the MPI program PingPong with a single
process, which will always be assigned rank 0. The process has
displayed the name of the computer it is running on (our computer
is named "jeltz") and returned. When you run this program, you
might get a warning from Windows Firewall like the following,
because PingPong is initiating network communications. Just select
"Unblock" to let the program execute.
To make PingPong more interesting, we will instruct MPI to
execute 8 separate processes in the PingPong job, all
coordinating via MPI. Each of the processes will execute the
PingPong program, but because they have different MPI ranks
(integers 0 through 7, inclusive), each will act slightly
differently. To run MPI programs with multiple processes, we use
the mpiexec
program provided by the Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack or its SDK,
as follows (all on a single command line):
C:\Program Files\MPI.NET>"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack\Bin\mpiexec.exe" -n 8 PingPong.exe
Rank 0 is alive and running on jeltz
Pinging process with rank 1... Pong!
Rank 1 is alive and running on jeltz
Pinging process with rank 2... Pong!
Rank 2 is alive and running on jeltz
Pinging process with rank 3... Pong!
Rank 3 is alive and running on jeltz
Pinging process with rank 4... Pong!
Rank 4 is alive and running on jeltz
Pinging process with rank 5... Pong!
Rank 5 is alive and running on jeltz
Pinging process with rank 6... Pong!
Rank 6 is alive and running on jeltz
Pinging process with rank 7... Pong!
Rank 7 is alive and running on jeltz
That's it! The mpiexec program launched 8 separate
processes that are working together as a single MPI
program. The -n 8 argument
instructs mpiexec to start 8 processes that will all
communicate via MPI (you can specify any number of processes here).
In the PingPong program, the process with rank 0 will send a "ping"
to each of the other processes, and report the name of the computer
running that process back to the user. Since we haven't
told mpiexec to run on different computers, all 8
processes are running on our workstation; however, the same program
would work even if the 8 processes were running on different
machines.
If PingPong ran correctly on your system, your installation of
MPI.NET is complete and you're ready to move on the programming in
MPI.NET. If you are going to be developing and running MPI programs,
you will probably want to add the Compute Cluster
Pack's Bin directory to your PATH
environment variable, so that you can run mpiexec
directly. From now on, we're going to assume that you have done so
and will just use mpiexec in our examples without
providing its path.
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