There are several pieces of software you will wish to install before the workshop. Though installation help will be provided at the workshop, we recommend that these tools are installed (or at least downloaded) beforehand.
SSH
All students should have an SSH client installed. SSH is a tool that allows us to connect to and use a remote computer as our own. Please follow the directions below to install an SSH client for your system.
Windows
Install MobaXterm from http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net. You will want to get the Home edition (Installer edition).
macOS
Although macOS comes with SSH pre-installed, you will likely want to install XQuartz to enable graphical support. Note that you must restart your computer to complete the installation.
Linux
Linux users do not need to install anything, you should be set!
File Transfer
A cross-platform tool FileZilla can be installed from https://filezilla-project.org. This will allow easy file transfer to and from the remote systems.
MPI
If not using Hawk see below for platform instructions.
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows makes available Microsoft MPI (MS-MPI). It is possible to download from the
website the latest version
(v10.1.2 has been tested. For the run-time
executables such as mpiexec install msmpisetup.exe, for compile time files such as include and library files install msmpisdk.msi.
You will need to install Microsoft Visual Studio. You can then compile C++ code using the tutorial on their website
It is also possible to install mpi4py on Windows with the above files. For example install
Python. Make sure you add Python to the the default PATH during installation. It is then
possible to run using cmd:
$ python -m venv venv
$ venv\Scripts\activate.bat
$ python -m pip install mpi4py
Then with an example MPI Python file mpihelloworld.py
$ mpiexec python mpihelloworld.py
Apple Mac
For a lot of software that is not supported by Apple can be installed with Homebrew.
After installing Homebrew, use
$ brew install openmpi
This should install Open MPI in /usr/local. This can then compile C code with mpicc or
C++ with mpicxx and run with mpirun or mpiexec.
Python can also be installed with Homebrew and then mpi4py can be installed using:
$ python3.7 -m venv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ python3.7 -m pip install -U pip
$ python3.7 -m pip install mpi4py
Linux
Open MPI tends to be available with many of the popular Linux distributions. For example Ubuntu can install Open MPI with
$ apt-get install openmpi-bin libopenmpi-dev
There is also MPICH which is a different implementation of the MPI standard. Either package
should provide compiler wrappers mpicc and mpicxx along with runtime executables mpirun or mpiexec.
Then install mpi4py
$ python3 -m venv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ python3 -m pip install -U pip
$ python3 -m pip install mpi4py