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SUT - Scalable Unix Tools

Introduction

SUT is a suite of scalable, parallelized Unix tools that take advantage of MPI for communication. They are designed to make administration and use of clusters easier by providing a versions of standard Unix utilities that simply have parallel semantics.

Prerequisite

mpd (the Multi-Purpose Daemon) is required to use SUT. mpd is available as part of MPICH from http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/.

Building

The most basic way to build ptools is to run

        ./configure
        make
        make install

If you'd like to customize your installation further, there are a few options to configure that are worth noting:

  --enable-static               Statically link the executables
  --enable-zlib[=prefix]        Use the zlib compression library
  --enable-lzo[=prefix]         Use the lzo compression library
  --with-new-mpd                The host mpd is new
  --with-procps=prefix          Specify where to find procps [prefix]
  --with-posix-regex[=prefix]   Specify where to find regex
  --with-max-nodes=nodes        Set the maximum number of nodes
                                to be supported[1024]
--enable-static:
        This builds the tools statically.  This is helpful when you're not sure
        if all the libraries used by ptools will be available on all the nodes
        in your cluster.

--enable-zlib[=prefix]:

        This enables the use of the zlib compression library by ptools.  This is
        used to speed transfers done by several of the programs.

--enable-lzo[=prefix]:

        This enables the use of the lzo compression library by ptools.  This is
        used to speed transfers done by several of the programs.  Note that lzo
        will often be faster than zlib.  lzo can be obtained from:
        http://wildsau.idv.uni-linz.ac.at/mfx/lzo.html

A note on compression:

        configure will search for both zlib and lzo.  lzo is preferred when no
        compression library is explicitly enabled.  Thus if both are on your
        system and you wish to force the use of zlib, use --enable-zlib.

--with-new-mpd

        This specifies that the host's mpd is new.  At the moment, this is almost
        always false.  SUT is developed internally with an, as of yet, unreleased
        version of mpd.  This version is likely to be released soon, but since
        it is not currently available, this option is only to be used by SUT 
        developers.  This will evolve into --with-old-mpd when the new version
        of mpd appears.

--with-procps[=prefix]:

        This enables the use of the procps library by ptools.  procps is used by
        ptfps to gather information about processes on the system.  procps can 
        be obtained from:
        ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/linux/system/status/ps/

--with-posix-regex[=prefix]:

This enables the use of POSIX regular expressions by several SUT.

--with-max-nodes=nodes:

        This sets the maximum number of nodes in your cluster.  The default is
        1024.

It is also recommended that you use

make install-strip

instead of

make install

to reduce the size of the binaries.

Platforms

SUT appears to work on Linux/x86, Linux/Alpha, Solaris/SPARC, IRIX, and AIX, but no extensive testing has been done on any platform.