SPITZ

SPITZ is a reference implementation of the parallel programing model SPITS (Scalable Partially Idempotent Tasks System). This allows you to implement parallel programs that will scale in big heterogeneous clusters and offer fault tolerance.

This is achieved by a C API where you only need to implement the important functions for your problem, hiding the complexity of load balancing, fault tolerance, task distribution, etc.

Prerequisites

To compile SPITZ you need the following programs:

• C and C++ compiler
• Make
• MPI

For Ubuntu/Debian:

apt-get install make gcc g++ openmpi-bin libopenmpi-dev

For CentOS/Redhat:

yum install make gcc gcc-c++ openmpi openmpi-devel

For Arch Linux:

pacman -S make gcc openmpi

Compiling

SPITZ uses CMake as a building platform. To compile issue the following commands:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Examples

There is a very simple example that calculates pi using Monte-Carlo algorithm in the directory examples. To run the test, execute

cd build/examples
make test-pi-c test-pi-cpp

Take a look at examples/pi.c to see how it was implemented. You might also want to read examples/CMakeLists.txt to understand the build process.

System wide installation

To install SPITZ in the default directory (/usr/local) issue the following command:

cd build
make install

If you want to change the prefix directory, issue:

cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
make install

Troubleshooting

mpirun was unable to find the specified executable file

If you are getting this MPI error message it means the SPITZ binary isn't in your PATH. You probably need to set the PATH environment variable to point to the correct location like so:

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/install/dir/bin

error while loading shared libraries: libspitz.so

This probably means that libspitz.so was installed in a unusual place, so you need to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to point to the installation directory like so:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/path/to/install/dir/lib

Roadmap

SPITZ next goal is to remove the MPI dependency and implement its own communication protocol to better support machine failures and allow dynamic provisioning.

Reporting bugs

If you find any bug you may report an issue in the github repository here: github.com/ianliu/spitz/issues. We will be very happy to fix them!