MRG Interactive Developments

Mesoscale Research Group, McGill University

MPICH Installation on a Linux Fedora Platform

  • MPICH Background
  • MPICH Linux Installation



    • General Information about MPICH

    The best place to get the complete story about the various implementations of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) is from the home pages of the developers at the MPI/MPICH Home.

    Installing MPICH on a Linux Fedora System

    We ran into a few problems in the generation of the f90 libraries during our installation of MPICH 1.2.5 on an AMD Optiron machine running Linux Redhat Fedora. Specifically, the Portland Group Fortran compiler wrappers seem to be poorly detected by configure and lead to numerous linker errors, notably at install time. A good way to check for this problem (assuming that you don't sit there and watch the install process) is to compile and link using "mpif90 pi3f90.f90" in the "installtest" toplevel subdirectory. If the executable is generated without a problem then you're good to go, but if you wind up with a series of linker errors (probably starting with MPI_INIT in MAIN) then you'll need to rebuild the package with the following environment variables set:

  • F90=pgf90
  • FC=pgf77
  • CC=pgcc
  • CXX=pgCC
  • CFLAGS="-Msignextend -DUSE_U_INT_FOR_XDR -DHAVE_RPC_RPC_H=1"
  • LIBS="-L/usr/pgi/linux86/5.0/lib -lpgftnrtl -lpgf90rtl -lpgc"

    • The first four settings simply inform configure that the Portland Group compiler should be used for all compilation. The CFLAGS setting is taken directly from the MPICH installation notes page, and sets definitions no auto-detected by configure. The LIBS setting points configure in the right direction for the wrappers, and is the most critical of the definitions listed above. Other than that (and perhaps a --prefix), the blind configure worked fine with Fedora and the package appears to be fully functional on the system.



    Questions or Comments? Contact our WebMaster.