mpich on heterogenous processors. Possible?

[Ben]

Hi,

I have an AMD 64 dual core machine with mpich installed on it and an
intel dual core laptop with mpich installed on it. Can I link them to
have a 4 core mpich machine or must all mpi nodes have the same
processor?

Cheers,
Ben

[Georg Bisseling]

Post by Ben
Hi,
I have an AMD 64 dual core machine with mpich installed on it and an
intel dual core laptop with mpich installed on it. Can I link them to
have a 4 core mpich machine or must all mpi nodes have the same
processor?
Cheers,
Ben

If you manage to use the same (SAME means same kernel, same libraries etc.,
same "number of bits") OS on both machines and your MPI and program does
only contain optimizations that are supported on both CPUs (or is a fat binary)
then it should work. In fact you would not really consider this heterogeneous,
would you?

But load imbalance (or better speed imbalance) might slow you down to the
slower of both nodes.

If you get really heterogeneous, then there are some caveats. For example
you can not use MPICH2 but have to use the older mpich branch.