Michele's wiki/blog

→ Make sure passwordless ssh access is enabled: start "Remote Login" under System Preferences/Sharing, then generate a public/private dsa key pair.

ssh-keygen -t dsa
[tap enter three times]
cp $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys2

→ Then try ssh localhost, which should go through without a password.

→ Install MPICH1.

curl http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich1/downloads/mpich.tar.gz \
    > mpich.tar.gz
tar zxf mpich.tar.gz
cd mpich-1.2.7p1
./configure --with-device=ch_p4 -rsh=ssh --prefix=$HOME
make
make install
cd ..

→ Make sure $HOME/bin is in your PATH.

→ Install mpi4py.

curl http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/m/mpi4py/mpi4py-0.5.0.tar.gz  \
    > mpi4py.tar.gz
tar zxf mpi4py.tar.gz
cd mpi4py-0.5.0
python setup.py install --prefix=$HOME
ln -s /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework .
[this seems to be needed on Tiger with Python 2.5]
python setup.py build_exe
cp build/exe.macosx-10.3-fat-2.5/mpi4py $HOME/bin/.
cd ..

→ $HOME/bin/mpi4py is now a parallelized Python interpreter that needs to be used with mpirun instead of python.

→ Now we're all set; as a test, we can run mpi4py-0.5.0/tests/helloworld.py. Because of mpich1's peculiarities, mpirun needs to be given the explicit location of mpi4py.

mpirun -np 4 $HOME/bin/mpi4py helloworld.py

→ Alas, this fails, because mpirun does not pass the correct environment (including PYTHONPATH to the slaves. One possibility is to hardwire the PYTHONPATH in the python script, adding something like this at the top:

import sys, os
sys.path.append(os.environ['HOME'] + '/lib/python2.5/site-packages')