I have access to a clustered network at my college using PelicanHPC where In run various MPI programs, but at home I want to practice writing/using other MPI programs. Is there a way that I can run MPI programs on my own system?
(I work on Ubuntu Jaunty)
So according to http://idea.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix/, on PelicanHPC "The LAM-MPI and OpenMPI implementations of MPI are installed."
I don't know about LAM-MPI, but I know OpenMPI will automatically balance threads across multiple processors, as long as you don't ask for more threads than processors. This means that with a dual-core computer, you can "mpirun -n 2" to your heart's content. However, if you want to "mpirun -n 8" with true parallelism, you'd need 4 dual-core boxes.