Octave MPI : Octave bindings for basic Message Passing Interface (MPI) functions for parallel computing.

CONTENTS:

1. HISTORY
2. INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
3. ORIGINAL README

1. HISTORY

This project was started in 2010 under the name openmpi_ext By Riccardo Corradini in collaboration with Jaroslav Hajek. It was intended as more intuitive and more maintainable alternative to other similar packages existing at that time, namely the MPI Toolbox for Octave (MPITB) by Javier Fernández Baldomero and Mancia Anguita.

Carlo de Falco started contributing in 2012, then took over the package maintainance in 2014 after Riccardo Corradini had stepped down in 2013. At the same time the name of the package was changed to mpi.

Since 2017 the main repository for the package was moved out of sourceforge and is now at https://github.com/carlodefalco/octave-mpi

2. INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

The makefile included derives all the info it needs for building the code from running mpicxx, so make sure that mpicxx is in your path before running Octave or type

putenv ("PATH", ["/path/to/mpicxx:" getenv("PATH")])

from within Octave. Once this is done you should be able to install mpi from a locally dowloaded tarball by doing:

pkg install mpi-<version>.tar.gz

or directly from the url by doing

pkg install 'https://github.com/carlodefalco/octave-mpi/releases/download/v<version number>/mpi-<version number>.tar.gz'

3. ORIGINAL README

Below are the contents of the original README file included with the first release by R. Corradini, most of the info there is very outdated but they are still reported here, just in case, mainly for historical reasons

The code is general-purpose, but I would like to use it for econometrics. So the first step will be to install the following tarball from http://www.open-mpi.org/software/ompi/v1.3/downloads/openmpi-1.3.3.tar.bz2 possibly in a multi-core computer to run my simple examples and configure it for instance in the following way (/home/user is your $HOME) ./configure --enable-mpirun-prefix-by-default --enable-heterogeneous --prefix=/home/user/openmpi-1.3.3/ --enable-static

and modify .bashrc in your home OMPIBIN=$ompi_info -path bindir -parsable | cut -d: -f3 OMPILIB=$ompi_info -path libdir -parsable | cut -d: -f3 OMPISCD=$ompi_info -path sysconfdir -parsable | cut -d: -f3

export PATH=$OMPIBIN:$PATH

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=:$OMPILIB:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

unset ompi_info OMPIBIN OMPILIB OMPISCD

If you want to install it on a simple toy network, just assign a static ip address on every linux computer and set up an ssh connection with no password (see for instance http://linuxproblem.org/art_9.html ) and then install openmpi and octave always with the same versions and with the same info on .bashrc for the same user.

After this type in a terminal mpiCC --showme In my case I will have something like

g++ -I/home/user/openmpi-1.3.3/include -pthread -L/home/user/openmpi-1.3.3/lib -lmpi_cxx -lmpi -lopen-rte -lopen-pal -ldl -Wl,--export-dynamic -lnsl -lutil -lm -ldl

This will be useful for mkoctfile for instance for MPI_Init.cc we shall have mkoctfile -I/home/user/openmpi-1.3.3/include -lpthread -L/home/user/openmpi-1.3.3/lib -lmpi_cxx -lmpi -lopen-rte -lopen-pal -ldl -lnsl -lutil -lm -ldl MPI_Init.cc

The m files just contain some very simple examples More complex examples will be provided in the next future. See also http://static.msi.umn.edu/tutorial/scicomp/general/MPI/content6.html to understand the logic of MPI Derived Datatypes and how could they be easily handled by openmpi_ext package. Bests regards Riccardo Corradini