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.