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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:

1. The p4 device is not celebrated for its performance.
2. 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.

• The MPI-Layer. This is the whole bunch under /src in the MPICH source tree, including the Fortran bindings. They have been tested with MS Fortran PowerStation 4.0, Intel Fortran 4.5 and the Salford FTN77 compiler. Also supported (but currently untested) are Compaq Visual Fortran, Absoft FortranPro, Lahey LF77/95, and the Portland Group compiler.
• The ch_shmem device. This is a ported and improved version of the lfshmem device as used under UNIX with a modified startup code that works under NT.
• All MPE functions with complete support for logging (ALOG, CLOG and SLOG) and graphics.
• MPI-IO: ROMIO is included in NT-MPICH. We created a new ADIO device for NT (see below).
• C++ Bindings: The C++ bindings from Notre-Dame have also been ported. Currently the profiling interface for the C++ functions is not supported.
• profiling library: NT-MPICH supports the complete profiling interface and contains a port of the wrappergen utility.
• Tools:
• Jumpshot for visualizing CLOG log files and
• Jumpshot-3 for SLOG log files.
• Wrappergen, to create profiling wrappers.
• A device called ch_wsock that can be used on TCP/IP connected clusters. This is where the most work has been done.
• The ch_smi device from SCI-MPICH. It is intended to be used on SCI connected clusters and is now fully functional under NT.
• A combined device called ch_wsock2 that consists of a combination of ch_ntshmem and ch_wsock. This device supports both SMPs and nodes connected over a network. Also combinations of both are possible.
• An ADIO device for ROMIO called ad_ntfs. This device supports all filesystems NT supports. However, we are not quite sure if the device works correctly on SMB filesystems as far as consistency is concerned. We did not notice any probles yet but of cause that does not mean that there are no problems. So if you notice any inconsistencies when using ad_ntfs on network drives please tell us.
• remote execution tools:
• 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.
• An MPE graphics server, used to display MPE graphics.

NT-MPICH is implemented as a dll. So to use the binaries you need a compiler that is able either to link VC++ 5.0 import libs or a tool that can make use of a dll in a different way. Since the Fortran bindings are located in a static library your Fortran compiler's linker must be able to link VC++ 6.0 static libraries. If you want to compile the sources, VC++ 6.0 is required.

For starting an MPICH program a tool to start programs on remote computers is needed. Unfortunately NT has no standard mechanism to do so. However, there are several solutions for this problem on the internet. So if you already have installed such kind of tool you are ready to compute. If you don't, we offer a sophisticated tool for NT based clusters called NTRexec. It is included in both the source and binary distribution of NT-MPICH.

The people that are more or less involved into MP-MPICH are:

If you want to get a notification when this page changes (which mostly will occur by additions in the "What's new" section and might occur more frequently than announcements via the mailing list), you may use a service offered by Netmind. Because we note all relevant changes and updates of all parts of MP-MPICH (which are NT-MPICH and SCI-MPICH), it is sufficient to just watch this page.