MPICH: How to publish_name such that a client application can lookup_name it?

Question

While learning MPI using MPICH in windows (1.4.1p1) I found some sample code here. Originally, when I ran the server, I would have to copy the generated port_name

Answer 1

This approach of publishing names, looking them up, and connecting to them is outlandish relative to normal MPI usage.

The standard pattern is to use mpirun to specify a set of nodes on which to launch a given number of processes. The operation of common implementations of mpirun implementations is explained in another question

Once the processes are all launched as part of a single parallel job, the MPI library reads whatever information the launcher provided during MPI_Init to set up MPI_COMM_WORLD, a communicator over the group of all processes in the job.

Using that communicator, the parallel application can distribute work, exchange information, and so forth. It would do this using the common MPI_Send and MPI_Recv routines, in all their variants, the collective operations, and so forth.

Answer 2

I uploaded a working version using OpenMPI 1.6.5 of a client and server in C on Ubuntu that uses the ompi-server name server here:

OpenMPI nameserver client server example in C