[mpich-discuss] non mpich programs question

[Nicolas Rosner]

Hi Andrew,

Message-passing function calls are never generated automatically:
someone must have written the software (or part of it) using MPI calls
before it can take advantage of MPI-based parallelism.

So the short answer is: No, you won't get a speed boost by merely
running any commercial program like Photoshop on an MPI-enabled
machine or cluster.

However, many such programs (especially, but not only, 3D and A/V
rendering software) do have some  parallel and/or distributed
processing abilities, sometimes built-in, sometimes as an add-on of
some sort (e.g. a "rendering farm" component, etc).

Each such component may or may not be able to use MPI as a back-end
(some use their own flavor of message-passing, esp. commercial ones,
but it depends on the case).

Hope this helps,
Happy MPICH user



On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Andrew Toney <velcropunk87 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Support,
> Will commercial software such as Photoshop, Rhino, Bonzai, or 3dsMax run on
> a Windows Xp system with mpich2 installed, and have its 'messages passed'
> (ie run in parallel on the nodes), or because the software is not compiled
> to run on mpi configuration will only run on the host computer?
> Thanks,
> Hopeful MPICH user
> _______________________________________________
> mpich-discuss mailing list
> mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov
> https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/mailman/listinfo/mpich-discuss
>
>