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Announcing MPICH-G2

September 14, 2000

Northern Illinois University and Argonne National Laboratory are pleased to announce the release of MPICH-G2, a grid-enabled implementation of the MPI v1.1 standard. MPI (Message Passing Interface) is a widely-used standard for writing message-passing programs. The message passing technique is frequently used in applications run on massively parallel supercomputers or workstation clusters. MPICH-G2 allows MPI applications to be run on multiple machines, including machines of different architectures that utilize different scheduling systems.

MPICH-G2 uses services provided by the Globus Toolkit to coordinate and manage work on multiple computer systems. MPICH-G2 automatically converts data in messages sent between machines of different architectures and supports multi-protocol communication by automatically selecting TCP for inter-machine messaging and vendor-supplied MPI (where available) for intra-machine messaging.

MPICH-G2 represents a complete re-design of the earlier grid-enabled implementation of MPI, MPICH-G. MPICH-G2 is implemented as a "device" within the popular MPICH libary, developed and distributed by Bill Gropp and Ewing (Rusty) Lusk of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory.

For additional information about MPICH-G2 (including download details), see http://www.hpclab.niu.edu/mpi/.

Release 1.1.4 of the Globus Toolkit Supports MPICH-G2

MPICH-G2, the Grid-enabled MPI implementation, requires an interim release of the Globus Toolkit: release 1.1.4. This release is now available from the Globus website at http://www-unix.globus.org/toolkit/.

Globus installations prior to 1.1.3 should be upgraded to 1.1.4 in order to use MPICH-G2. Users of release 1.1.3 of the Globus Toolkit who wish to use MPICH-G2 should obtain the 1.1.4 release and re-install their client tools and development libraries. Sites with existing 1.1.3 servers do not need to redeploy Globus services to use MPICH-G2. (In most cases, this means that sites with release 1.1.3 already running can build the 1.1.4 release, run globus-install, and not run globus-local-deploy on individual systems.)