Picking an MPI for Windows HPC Server 2008 and C++

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Blog post by Christian Terboven on picking and building BOOST.MPI on HPC Server 2008 for use via C++

If you are a MPI programmer, you probably know that there are C++ bindings for MPI, which nowadays come with most MPI distributions. Personally, I find they are ugly and do not provide any advantage over using the plain C bindings. In addition, there are even some disadvantages in using the C++ bindings, as I encountered that they are causing problems for several MPI analysis tools (under some circumstances). If you are intending to use the MPI C++ bindings on Windows, you will find that MS-MPI does not come with them. So if you really need them, I would advise to use Intel MPI on Windows – but if you are interested in better C++ bindings for MPI, I would advise to take a look at the BOOST.MPI bindings.

This brief blog post is intended to get you started building and using BOOST.MPI on Windows HPC Server 2008. I will provide just basic BOOST build instructions and point you to the “Getting Started on Windows”-guide at the BOOST homepage for more details.