This is a Vagrantfile (to be used with HashiCorp's Vagrant tool) for automatically bringing up a cluster suitable for testing MPI loads.
Practically, all this involves is bringing up several VMs on a private network, setting up SSH key-based authentication between them, and installing OpenMPI.
Currently only works with the VirtualBox provider.
In your checkout directory, simply run:
$ vagrant up
By default, the cluster will be made of 3 VMs. If you want more,
change N_VMS in the Vagrantfile.
The VMs will be named node1 through node<n>. To SSH to, say, node1:
$ vagrant ssh node1
As a simple sanity check, try running hostname on each machine in the
cluster:
vagrant@node1:~$ mpirun -np 3 --host node1,node2,node3 hostname
Note that OpenMPI will try to use all networks it thinks are common
to all hosts for any inter-node communication, including Vagrant's
host-only networks. To work around this, you should tell mpirun explicitly
which networks to use:
vagrant@node1:~$ mpirun -np 3 --host node1,node2,node3 --mca btl_tcp_if_include 192.168.0.0/24 hostname
For more detail, see http://www.open-mpi.org/faq/?category=tcp#tcp-selection.