Hi all,
My thanks to all those involved for putting together this Windows binary
release of OpenMPI! I am hoping to use it in a small Windows based OpenMPI
cluster at home.
Unfortunately my experience so far has not exactly been trouble free. It seems
that, due to the fact that this release is using WMI, there are a number of
settings that must be configured on the machines in order to get this to work.
These settings are not documented in the distribution at all. I have been
experimenting with it for over a week on and off and as soon as I solve one
problem, another one arises.
Currently, after much searching, reading, and tinkering with DCOM settings
etc..., I can remotely start processes on all my machines using mpirun but
those processes cannot access network shares (e.g. for binary distribution) and
HPL (which works on any one node) does not seem to work if I run it across
multiple nodes, also indicating a network issue (CPU sits at 100% in all
processes with no network traffic and never terminates). To eliminate
premission issues that may be caused by UAC I tried the same setup on two
domain machines using an administrative account to launch and the behavior was
the same. I have read that WMI processes cannot access network resources and I
am at a loss for a solution to this newest of problems. If anyone knows how to
make this work I would appreciate the help. I assume that someone has gotten
this working and has the answers.
I have searched the mailing list archives and I found other users with similar
problems but no clear guidance on the threads. Some threads make references to
Microsoft KB articles but do not explicitly tell the user what needs to be
done, leaving each new user to rediscover the tricks on their own. One thread
made it appear that testing had only been done on Windows XP. Needless to say,
security has changed dramatically in Windows since XP!
I would like to see OpenMPI for Windows be usable by a newcomer without all of
this pain.
What would be fantastic would be:
1) a step-by-step procedure for how to get OpenMPI 1.5 working on Windows
a) preferably in a bare Windows 7 workgroup environment with nothing else
(i.e. no Microsoft Cluster Compute Pack, no domain etc...)
2) inclusion of these steps in the binary distribution
3) bonus points for a script which accomplishes these things automatically
If someone can help with (1), I would happily volunteer my time to work on (3).
Regards,
Jason
