Introduction to using the SP2
Hardware overview
The SP2 consists of a control workstation (sp2-cw) and 16 processing nodes
(sp2-01, sp2-02, etc..).
In addition to standard ethernet, the processing
nodes are interconnected through a high performance switch. The switch
interfaces are associated with the names sp2-n01, sp2-n02, etc.. When using
TCP/IP, make sure to use the switch names to get better performance,
otherwise the communication will go through 10baseT ethernet. Note that
the control workstation sp2-cw is NOT connected to the switch.
A second standalone RS6000 (sp2-cw2) can be used for compiling; it's a
somewhat faster machine. The IBM compilers
are only available on this machine. The MPI libraries and compiling tools are
installed on sp2-cw2, however, this machine cannot be used to run MPI parallel
jobs directly; that has to be done from sp2-cw.
NOTE: at this time, nodes 14 and 8 are down.
Logging in
To login to sp2-cw or sp2-cw2, use rlogin from any CS workstation with the
-F (forward ticket) option:
rlogin -F sp2-cw
You'll want to add /p/sp2/bin at the beginning of your path, as many common commands are found
there; there is no /s/std for AIX. You might also want to add
/usr/lpp/ssp/bin, where most of the parallel commands are found.
If you don't specify the -F option to rlogin, you will get logged in but
will not have any AFS access.
Getting help
In addition to the usual man pages, AIX has a graphical help facility
called info.
Make sure that your DISPLAY environment variable is set to the host
where you're logged in. If it is not
set, info will start up the text client instead of the X client.
The default library is the AIX info library. You can use the -l option (or
the file->library->select menu option) to request
other libraries. Available libraries are:
- pe: Parallel computing environment
- sp2: SP2 specific documentation
- C: C for AIX
- cset: cset (C++) compiler
Questions can also be mailed to lab or to dionne, but please make sure that
you've read the relevant documentation before asking questions.
Compiling
egcs version 1.0.3 is available as /p/sp2/bin/gcc or /s/gcc/bin/gcc. IBM's compiler (cc, CC, xlc, xlC) is
available only on sp2-cw2, due to licensing reasons (and it's in /usr/bin).
Last updated Thu Mar 11 13:04:23 CST 1999 by Marc Dionne
dionne@cs.wisc.edu