Introduction

Mpich is a freely available implementation of the MPI standard that runs on a wide variety of systems. The details of the mpich implementation are described in [10]; related papers include [7] and [8].

Mpich is no longer being developed; the current release may be the last release of mpich. A new version of MPI, MPICH2, is available from www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich2. This all-new implementation of MPI includes all of both MPI-1 and MPI-2

Major Features of mpich:

Full MPI 1.2 compliance, including cancel of sends.

MPMD programs (see Section MPMD Programs ) and heterogeneous clusters are supported.

The MPI-2 standard C++ bindings are available for the MPI-1 functions.

Both Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 bindings, including both mpif.h and an MPI module.

A Windows NT version is available as open source. The installation and use for this version is different; this manual covers only the Unix version of mpich.

Supports a wide variety of environments, including clusters of SMPs and massively parallel computers.

Follows many (but not yet all) of GNU-recommended build and install targets, including VPATH.

Parts of MPI-2 are also supported:

Most of MPI-IO is supported through the ROMIO implementation (See romio/README for details).

Support for MPI_INIT_THREAD (but only for MPI_THREAD_SINGLE and MPI_THREAD_FUNNELLED).

Miscellaneous new MPI_Info and MPI_Datatype routines.

Mpich also includes components of a parallel programming environment, including

Tracing and logfile tools based on the MPI profiling interface, including a scalable logfile format (SLOG).

Parallel performance visualization tools (upshot and jumpshot).

Extensive correctness and performance tests.

Both large and small application examples.