By David Pheasant

Advisor: Prof. David Hemmendinger

I am working with MPI (Message Passing Interface) which is a set of C/C++/Fortran libraries to allow message passing between processes and machines. MPI tries to hide all of the nitty-gritty aspects of communication from the user. (i.e. differences in architecture, big/little-endian number representation, communication protocols) This allows the programmer to create a single piece of software that will talk to computers in a heterogeneous setting using a standard set of send/receive functions/methods. (pretty cool I think) All of this is in preparation for a 25 node linuxNetworx Beowulf cluster we are receiving from GE. (Although WHEN is still up in the air) I will be responsible for getting the bare-bones of the cluster together, which means installing the OS (Debian Linux, MPI, and management software (which will all be open source) and eventually doing some performance analysis on the cluster. At the moment I am using a small 5 node cluster of Sun Ultra10 machines to become familiar with the installation process of all the software and work out any bugs that appear.