HP-UX 11i June 2002 Release Notes

HP-UX 11i Operating Environment Applications
HP-UX 11i Technical Computing Operating Environment (TCOE)
Chapter 6
123
updated for
March 2002
New feature of HP MPI version 1.7.2:
• With the use of libmpirm.sl, the PA-RISC version of Load Sharing Facility (LSF)
can be run on the Itanium Processor Family (IPF) version of HP MPI.
updated for
September 2001
New features of HP MPI version 1.7 include the following:
• New start up. The new HP MPI start-up requires that MPI be installed in the same
directory on every execution host. The default is the location from which mpirun is
executed. This can be overridden with the MPI_ROOT environment variable. We
recommend setting the MPI_ROOT environment variable prior to starting mpirun.
Previous versions of HP MPI allowed mpirun to exit prior to application termination
by specifying the -W option. The option -W used with mpirun is no longer supported.
To achieve similar functionality, place mpirun in the background.
• Support for shared libraries. When a library is shared, programs using it contain
only references to library routines, as opposed to archive libraries, which must be
linked into every program using them. The same copy of the shared library is
referenced by each executable using it.
An advantage of shared libraries is that when the library is updated (e.g. to fix a
bug), all programs, which use the library immediately, enjoy the fix.
• Library names. Some of the libraries have been merged. Compilation wrappers have
been provided for convenience. Wrappers can also be used as templates.
• Multi-thread mode. By default, the non thread-compliant library (libmpi) is used
when running MPI jobs. Linking to the thread-compliant library (libmtmpi) is now
required only for applications that have multiple threads making MPI calls
simultaneously. In previous releases, linking to the thread-compliant library was
required for multi-threaded applications even if only one thread was making a MPI
call at a time.
• Additional MPI-2 support. HP MPI 1.7 expands MPI-2 support of one-sided
communications to clusters. Refer to “Appendix C” in the HP MPI User’s Guide, 6th
edition, for a full list of MPI-2 support.
• New options for handling standard IO. HP MPI 1.7 supports several new options for
handling standard IO streams.
All standard input is routed through the mpirun process. Standard input to mpirun
is selectively ignored (default behavior), replicated to all of the MPI processes, or
directed to a single process. Input intended for one or all of the processes in an MPI
application should therefore be directed to the standard input of mpirun.
Since mpirun reads stdin on behalf of the processes, running an MPI application in
the background will result in the application being suspended by most shells. For
this reason, the default mode for stdin is off. Running applications in the
background will not work with stdin turned on.
• Backtrace functionality. HP MPI 1.7 handles several common termination signals
differently (on PA-RISC systems) than earlier versions of HP MPI by printing a
stack trace prior to termination. The backtrace is helpful in determining where the
signal was generated and the call stack at the time of the error.