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OpenMPI is an open-source message passing interface (MPI) library used for parallel computing on distributed systems. It enables developers to create high-performance computing applications by allowing multiple processes to communicate and coordinate with each other across a network.

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Quick start guide

  1. Prerequisites
  2. Starting a virtual machine with cudoctl
  3. Installing NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit and OpenMPI via SSH
  4. Creating a custom disk image

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Prerequisites

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Starting a virtual machine with cudoctl

Start a virtual machine with the base image you require, here we will start with an image that already has NVIDIA drivers. You can use the web console to start a virtual machine using the Ubuntu 22.04 + NVIDIA drivers + Docker image or alternatively use the command line tool cudoctl First we search to find a virtual machine type to start 
cudoctl search --vcpus 4 --mem 8 --gpus 1
After deciding on a machine type of epyc-milan-rtx-a4000 in the se-smedjebacken-1 data center we can start a virtual machine: 
cudoctl vm create --id mpi-cuda --image ubuntu-nvidia-docker --machine-type epyc-milan-rtx-a4000 --memory 8 --vcpus 4  --gpus 1 --boot-disk-size 100 -boot-disk-class network --data-center se-smedjebacken-1

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Installing NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit and OpenMPI via SSH

Get the IP address of the virtual machine 
cudoctl vm get mpi-cuda | grep IP
Insert the IP address into this snippet and run it to install CUDA and OpenMPI 
ssh root@<YOUR_IP> << EOF
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu2204/x86_64/cuda-ubuntu2204.pin
mv cuda-ubuntu2204.pin /etc/apt/preferences.d/cuda-repository-pin-600
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/12.3.2/local_installers/cuda-repo-ubuntu2204-12-3-local_12.3.2-545.23.08-1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu2204-12-3-local_12.3.2-545.23.08-1_amd64.deb
cp /var/cuda-repo-ubuntu2204-12-3-local/cuda-*-keyring.gpg /usr/share/keyrings/
apt-get update
apt-get -y install cuda-toolkit-12-3

wget https://download.open-mpi.org/release/open-mpi/v5.0/openmpi-5.0.2.tar.gz
tar xf openmpi-5.0.2.tar.gz
cd openmpi-5.0.2
./configure  --with-cuda=/usr/local/cuda
make -j8 all
make install
echo >> export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH >> ~/.bashrc
EOF
Wait for the installation to finish

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Creating a custom disk image

Create a new disk called mpi-cuda-image 
cudoctl vm save-image --vm mpi-cuda mpi-cuda-image
Now we can create an MPI worker with it 
cudoctl vm create --id mpi-cuda-worker --image mpi-cuda-image --machine-type epyc-milan-rtx-a4000 --memory 8 --vcpus 4 --gpus 1 --boot-disk-size 100 -boot-disk-class network --data-center se-smedjebacken-1