MPI for Windows Clusters

NT-MPICH

Usage

Features

NTRexec

People

Clusters based on nodes with Windows operating system became more and more interesting for parallel computing. One drawback of this platform is the fact that Windows NT and XP have no system facilities to create processes on remote computers.
Since this is essential for distributed applications we tried to create a flexible and secure tool that can easyly be extended. We created a collection of three tools which allow users to create processes on each Windows computing node our service is installed on:

A service called Cluster manager that can be used to gather information about remote computers and to start processes on them

A graphical frontend to the cluster manager, called RexecShell

A command-line frontend to the cluster manager called mpiexec

Mpiexec is a shell based frontend that can be used in batch files e.g. mpiexec can be used in conjunction with a Batch Queuing System like PBS Pro.
RexecShell is an Easy-To-Use graphical front-end. The available computing nodes are displayed and the user can choose the executable and plugin for the application.

Both front-ends provide the user with facilities of cluster-management. The computing nodes can be rebooted by the frontends. RexecShell additionally displays information about the computers like running processes as well as hardware and operating system details.

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