Building MPICH2 on 32 bit Linux

[forumadmin]

This post provides instructions on building MPICH2 on 32 bit Linux with Absoft Pro Fortran 11.5 and later.

MPICH2 is a high-performance and widely portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard (both MPI-1 and MPI-2).

DOWNLOADING THE REQUIRED PACKAGE

The MPICH2 package is available at this site http://www.mpich.org/downloads. At the time this post was updated, the current stable release for MPICH2 was 3.2. It was released on November 12, 2015.  The instructions below use the source code package named mpich-3.2.tar.gz.

CREATING THE MPICH2 SOURCE TREE

Extract the MPICH2 source with the following command:

   tar -xzvf mpich-3.2.tar.gz

This will create a directory named mpich-3.2 in the current working directory.

MAKING A TARGET BUILD DIRECTORY

It is possible to configure and build MPICH2 directly inside the source directory. However, creating a separate build directory makes reconfiguring or maintaining more than one build (for example 32 and 64 bit builds) easier. The instructions below assume that a separate build directory has been created in the directory containing  the MPICH2 source directory using this command:

     mkdir mpich2-32build

ESTABLISHING THE COMPILATION ENVIRONMENT

Before configuring the MPICH2 software, you need to establish the Absoft compiler's environment variables by sourcing the absvars.sh script from the Absoft bin directory. For example,  this command establishes the environment for Absoft Pro Fortran 11.5 under the BASH shell:

     source /opt/absoft11.5/bin/absvars.sh

C shell users should use this command:

    source /opt/absoft11.5/bin/absvars.csh

CONFIGURING, BUILDING AND INSTALLING 32 BIT MPICH2

Use following commands configure, build  and install 32 bit MPICH2 with Absoft Fortran Pro 11.5 and later. These commands configure MPICH2 to install into /opt/mpich2-32. If you want to install to a different location, replace /opt/mpich2-32 in the --prefix= argument to the configure command.

   cd mpich2-32build

   ../mpich-3.2/configure --prefix=/opt/mpich2-32 F77=$ABSOFT/bin/af77 \
          FC=$ABSOFT/bin/af90

   make

   sudo make install


USING MPICH2

In order insure that correct MPICH2 commands are invoked, the installed MPICH2 bin directory should be added to your PATH variable.

For bash and sh users:

       export PATH=/opt/mpich2-32/bin:$PATH

For csh and tcsh users:

       setenv PATH /opt/mpich2-32/bin:$PATH

FURTHER INFORMATION

Further information on building MPICH2 can be found in the file named README located in the mpich-3.2 source directory.