NT-MPICH is part of the MP-MPICH distribution.
Project Description
Since the presentation of the first standard in 1994, the
Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become one of the most common API specifications
for parallel programming. The freely available Open-Source implementation
MPICH was very important for this development.
MPICH is the most commonly used, freely distributed implementation of the MPI-1 standard (including
parts of the MPI-2 standard) which is also used as a base for commercially distributed MPI Implementations.
Until version 1.2 of MPICH it had no Windows NT support.
Therefore, people working on this platform had to choose between mostly commercial MPI implementations which come in binary form only and quite old and no longer supported ports of MPICH.
So in conjunction with our SCI-MPICH project we
started to port MPICH to Windows NT. To our surprise this was fairly easy (congratulations to the people at ANL) and the first ping-pong program
using the SCI device was running after only 4 hours. Encouraged by this experience, we decided to offer a TCP device for
Windows to make NT-MPICH also useful for clusters only connected via standard networks.
The first idea was to port the ch_p4 device which is the de-facto standard on ethernet connected clusters.
But we decided that it is preferable to implement a new device, making use of the sophisticated features of the
Winsock 2 layer. The reasons for that are twofold:
- The p4 device is not celebrated for its performance.
- P4 makes heavy use of signals and the fork() system call which makes it hard to port it to NT.
Nevertheless there are ports of p4 to NT.
So we created ch_wsock which performs well and offers real nonblocking communication. It makes use of the advanced features of WINSOCK 2 like overlapping I/O.
NT-MPICH represents the Windows-part of MP-MPICH (Multi Platform MPICH).
Since version 1.2 MPICH comes with Windows NT support (called MPICH.NT).
Because NT-MPICH is more complete and provides better performance we decided not to abandon the project.
If you use an old version of NT-MPICH (before NT-MPICH 1.4.0) with Windows XP with Service Pack 2 you have to download a new version of the remote execution tools:
RexecTools.zip (ca. 600 KB)
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