[MPICH] reg. heterogeneous cluster - not yet

[Jayesh Krishna]

Hi,
 
>>>> 1) With SMPD process manager, is it possible to launch a single MPI
application across *NIX and Windows platform?

  Yes, you can run MPI applications across unix and windows platforms if you
are using the SMPD process manager.

>>>> 2) Does MPICH2 do automatic conversion between machines of different
binary formats...

  No, currently MPICH2 does not support running MPI apps across
heterogeneous systems (systems with different arch/binary formats). We will
have the heterogeneous support for MPICH2 by early next year.

>>>> 3) If answer to 1 & 2 is yes, should the Infiniband driver ...

  The latest version of MPICH2 on windows does not support IB channel (You
will have to use MPICH2 version < 1.0.3 on windows for IB channel support).
The plan is to support nemesis channel (which has support for IB) for
windows in future.

Regards,
Jayesh

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov
[mailto:owner-mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf Of Kalyana Krishna
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 10:56 PM
To: mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov
Subject: [MPICH] reg. heterogeneous cluster

Hi everyone,

I have a couple of questions regarding support of heterogeneous clusters
with mpich2.

1) With SMPD process manager, is it possible to launch a single MPI
application across *NIX and Windows platform?
2) Does MPICH2 do automatic conversion between machines of different binary
formats (big endian and little endian) as long as the size of the data types
is same on both platforms?
3) If answer to 1 & 2 is yes, should the Infiniband driver stack on all
machines be from the same vendor? (OpenIB, QLogic (Silverstorm), Cisco etc)?
Or can Linux have OpenIB stack and windows have vendor stack and still be
able to participate in a single MPI application?

thank you for your time.

regards,
Kalyan