Getting Started With the PPServer

This page is intended to help you get started using the Parallel Problems Server (ppserver).

I recommend first looking over the information available on the main webpage. In particular, the first and third papers under the 'Papers and Documentation' link provide a good introduction:

P. Husbands and C.Isbell. MATLAB*P: A Tool for Interactive Supercomputing. The Ninth SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, 1999.

P. Husbands and C. Isbell. The Parallel Problems Server: A Client-Server Model for Large Scale Scientific Computation. To appear in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Vector and Parallel Processing. Portugal, 1998.

 I haven't direct linked to the papers here as I don't want to worry about maintaining the links directly; they can be accessed as of this writing through the 'Papers and Documentation' link from the main ppserver webpage. Otherwise, try Google.

The following information assumes that you are planning to work with the ppserver in a very specific environment, specifically on Professor Isbell's machines at Georgia Tech. If you are working with a different setup, you will have to determine many of the following details yourself, but the general information may still be useful.

The ppserver installation can be found at /net/hf30/bin/matlabp on the 'pfunk' machines. You might want to take a look at doc/QuickStart.ps for some additional info to help you get started. However, I don't recommend trying the mentioned 'mm' command, as it appears to be unsupported in the s/w version we have installed. Chances are, this is no big deal as it doesn't appear to be a crucial function.

Basically, you can do the following on any of the 'pfunk' machines to get up and running with ppserver (taken from instructions put together by Gavin, thanks):

1. Set the appropriate environment variables in your rc script.
setenv LAMHOME /net/hf30/bin/lam
setenv LAMBIN $LAMHOME/bin
setenv MATLABP_HOME /net/hf30/bin/matlabp
setenv MATLABP_BIN $MATLABP_HOME/bin

 2. Set the LAMBIN and MATLABP_BIN in your path!

3. Source appropriate files

4. ssh over to a pfunk machine.

5. At the prompt start up the matlab ppserver.
% startmp 2


I'm working from these instructions, and I had no problems...hopefully this will get you started.

Have fun, feel free to contact me if you have problems (jkj at cc dot gatech dot edu).