What exactly is Simple Multi-Purpose Daemon?

Question

I am just starting to learn MPI. The implementation is MPICH2. The first thing I encountered is SMPD i.e Simple Multi-Purpose Daemon.

I want to know what exactly it is and how it is related to MPI

Most of the links on internet talks about its usage, but not the internal details. At max I know that:

Multipurpose daemon* (MPD) is the Intel® MPI Library process management system for starting parallel jobs.

Where can I learn more about it ?

Answer 1

SMPD is one implementation of parallel process manager, i.e. a system for launching/monitoring processes in a parallel job. SMPD was specifically useful for MPI jobs on Windows or a mix of Windows and Unix. See the MPICH FAQ: http://wiki.mpich.org/mpich/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Q:_What_are_process_managers.3F

Also note that the newest versions of MPICH use Hydra as the default process manager, and support for Windows has been dropped.