[Swift-devel] MPICH/Coasters

[Justin M Wozniak]

Hello
 	I just had a meeting with Pavan to talk about what we can do to 
run MPI jobs from Coasters given the new MPICH/Hydra features.  He's 
making a few modifications to MPICH to support this and they should be 
available soon.

Background on Hydra:

http://wiki.mcs.anl.gov/mpich2/index.php/Using_the_Hydra_Process_Manager#Bootstrap_Servers
http://wiki.mcs.anl.gov/mpich2/index.php/Hydra_Process_Management_Framework

Here's the basic idea so far:

* The CoasterService locally runs an mpiexec;
* mpiexec prints a list of (proxy) command lines, then listens;
* The CoasterService passes each command-line to a worker;
* The worker launches the proxy;
* The proxy connects back to mpiexec;
* mpiexec and the proxies complete the user job;
* mpiexec and the proxies shut down.

So, analogous to "manual Coasters", this is "manual MPICH", because 
Coasters is responsible for launching the proxies.

 	Justin

-- 
Justin M Wozniak