This book is designed to help you install the IBM Parallel Environment for AIX (PE) program product on the IBM RS/6000 SP or on a networked cluster of IBM RS/6000 processors.
This book assumes that AIX and the X-Windows system are already installed, if required. For information on installing AIX and X-Windows, consult IBM AIX for RS/6000 Installation Guide, SC23-2341.
This book is intended for system programmers and administrators, but should be used by anyone responsible for installing IBM Parallel Environment for AIX. To make this book a little easier to read, the name IBM Parallel Environment for AIX has been abbreviated to PE throughout.
To use this book, you should be familiar with the AIX operating system. Where necessary, some background information relating to AIX is provided. More commonly, you are referred to the appropriate documentation.
This book contains the following information:
This book uses the following typographic conventions:
| Type Style | Used For |
|---|---|
| bold | Bold words or characters represent system elements that you must use literally, such as command names, flag names, and path names. |
| italic | Italic words or characters represent variable values that you
must supply.
Italics are also used for book titles and for general emphasis in text. |
| Constant width | Examples and information that the system displays appear in constant width typeface. |
In addition to the highlighting conventions, this manual uses the following conventions when describing how to perform tasks. User actions appear in uppercase boldface type. For example, if the action is to enter the tool command, this manual presents the instruction as:
The symbol "*" indicates the system response to an action. So the system's response to entering the tool command would read:
As an alternative to ordering the individual books, you can use SBOF-8588 to order the entire PE library.
The following publication:
is available on the Web at:
http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixuser/aix6kdov/toc.htm
The following PSSP publications are related to this book only if you run parallel programs on the IBM RS/6000 SP. These books are not related if you use an IBM RS/6000 network cluster.
For National Language Support (NLS), all PE components and tools display messages located in externalized message catalogs. English versions of the message catalogs are shipped with the PE program product, but your site may be using its own translated message catalogs. The AIX environment variable NLSPATH is used by the various PE components to find the appropriate message catalog. NLSPATH specifies a list of directories to search for message catalogs. The directories are searched, in the order listed, to locate the message catalog. In resolving the path to the message catalog, NLSPATH is affected by the values of the environment variables LC_MESSAGES and LANG. If you get an error saying that a message catalog is not found, and want the default message catalog:
The PE message catalogs are in English and are located in these directories:
If your site is using its own translations of the message catalogs, consult your system administrator for the appropriate value of NLSPATH or LANG. For additional information on NLS and message catalogs, see IBM Parallel Environment for AIX: Messages, GC28-1982 and IBM AIX Version 4 General Programming Concepts: Writing and Debugging Programs, SC23-2533.
In order to use the PE man pages or access the PE online (HTML) publications, the ppe.pedocs file set must first be installed. To view the PE online publications, you also need access to an HTML document browser such as Netscape. An index to the HTML files that are provided with the ppe.pedocs file set is installed in the /usr/lpp/ppe.pedocs/html directory.
If you have a question about the SP, PSSP, or a related product, the following online information resources make it easy to find the information:
Note that the ssp.resctr fileset must be installed before you can do this.
If you have the Resource Center on CD-ROM, see the readme.txt file for information on how to run it.
All of the PE books are available in Portable Document Format (PDF). They are included on the product media (tape or CD-ROM), and are part of the ppe.pedocs file set. If you have a question about the location of the PE softcopy books, see your system administrator.
To view the PE PDF publications, you need access to the Adobe Acrobat Reader 3.0.1. The Acrobat Reader is shipped with the AIX Version 4.3 Bonus Pack and is also freely available for downloading from the Adobe web site at URL http://www.adobe.com.
As stated above, you can also view or download the PE books from the IBM RS/6000 Web site at http://www.rs6000.ibm.com. The serial and parallel programs that you find in this book are also available from the IBM RS/6000 Web site. At the time this manual was published, the full path was http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/resource/aix_resource/sp_books. However, note that the structure of the RS/6000 Web site can change over time.
With PE 2.4, POE supports user programs developed with AIX 4.3. It also supports programs developed with AIX 4.2, intended for execution on AIX 4.3.
This release of PE provides a mechanism for temporarily saving the state of a parallel program at a specific point (checkpointing), and then later restarting it from the saved state. When a program is checkpointed, the checkpointing function captures the state of the application as well as all data, and saves it in a file. When the program is restarted, the restart function retrieves the application information from the file it saved, and the program then starts running again from the place at which it was saved.
In earlier releases of PE, POE relied on the SP Resource Manager for performing job management functions. These functions included keeping track of which nodes were available or allocated and loading the switch tables for programs performing User Space communications. LoadLeveler, which had only been used for batch job submissions in the past, is now replacing the Resource Manager as the job management system for PE. One notable effect of this change is that LoadLeveler now allows you to run more than one User Space task per node.
With PE 2.4, the MPI library now includes support for a subset of MPI I/O, described by Chapter 9 of the MPI-2 document: MPI-2: Extensions to the Message-Passing Interface, Version 2.0. MPI-I/O provides a common programming interface, improving the portability of code that involves parallel I/O.
This release of PE supports a maximum of 1024 tasks per User Space MPI/LAPI job, as opposed to the previous release, which supported a maximum of 512 tasks. For jobs using the IP version of the MPI library, PE supports a maximum of 2048 tasks.
In this release, POE now supports the following compilers:
This release includes a variety of enhancements to Xprofiler, including:
The pedb debugger now includes a message queue facility. Part of the pedb debugger interface, the message queue viewing feature can help you debug Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications by showing internal message request queue information. With this feature, you can view: