MPI Libraries on Red Hat 5.3 for our Dell Servers


We have two Dell R900 servers in the seismology research group in our department of the university that were purchased from federal stimulus money. The purpose of this $50,000 of your tax money is to analyze the seismic data of the world and these two servers, with four 6 core processors and 128GB of RAM each can help our seismic researchers do this research. But first we had to recompile their old FORTRAN code to use some type of MPI library so that the code could efficiently be run on all 24 cores of each server. I checked the yum repositories for Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 and installed openmpi, mvapich and mvapich2 thinking one of those libraries would be good enough for our graduate students to use. But no, they wanted to use MPICH2 (luckily open source, of course). Okay, instead of just running a couple yum lines, I would have to grab external RPM files and see if that worked. We found the necessary Red Hat 5 RPM files at koji.fedoraproject.org, and grabbed the mpich2, mpich2-doc and mpich2-devel packages for rhel5. When I tried the rpm command on these three rpm archives it complained it needed environment-modules so I grabbed that rpm from koji as well. Then my rpm -i *.rpm command ran fine and the graduate student tried recompiling his code. It spit out some weird python error on the compile, but the code runs fine. He was even able to figure out how to execute it on both servers using mpich2 and a ssh connection so we did not have to cluster the two machines. So now we can use those machines to analyze seismic data. It is good to see some stimulus tax dollars actually at work!

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