Using Your Own Computer to Run CI-Tutor MPI Exercises

In order to use CI-Tutor courses and exercises involving MPI, you don't have to have access to TeraGrid resources: you can run MPI on your own machine. Simply install your favorite implementation of MPI, if one is not already pre-installed.

To find out whether MPI is already installed, run a query. For instance, on distributions that support rpm packaging:

OpenMPI (http:\\www.open-mpi.org) is a popular MPI implementation easily available for most Linux distributions. You must have root privileges in order to install OpenMPI on your system. The website includes tarballs and source code that you can download and use to build OpenMPI manually, or (if you are a relatively new Linux user) you can use the software management package that is included with your distribution. Below, we include example instructions for downloading and installing OpenMPI using the software management packages for two commonly-used Linux distributions, Fedora and Ubuntu.

For example, to download and install OpenMPI on a machine running Fedora (or another RedHat-based distribution), you should be able simply to run the yum package manager:

On an Ubuntu or other Debian-based distribution, you use the Synaptic or Aptitude package manager, either with the graphical user interface provided, or with the command line, e.g.:

To use your system's software management package, refer to your distribution's documentation.