Simulating computer cluster on simple desktop to test parallel algorithms

I want to try and learn MPI a开发者_JAVA技巧s well as parallel programming.

Can a sandbox be created on my desktop PC?

How can this be done?

Linux and windows solutions are welcome.

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If you want to learn MPI, you can definitely do it on a single PC (Most modern MPIs have shared memory based communication for local communication so you don't need additional configuration). So install a popular MPI (MPICH / OpenMPI) on a linux box and get going! If your programs are going to be CPU bound, I'd suggest only running job sizes that equal the number of processor cores on your machine.

Edit: Since you tagged it as a virtualization question, I wanted to add that you could also run MPI on multiple VMs (on VMPlayer or VirtualBox for example) and run your tests. This would need inter-vm networking to be configured (differs based on your virtualization software).

Whatever you choose (single PC vs VMs) it won't change the way you write your MPI programs. Since this is for learning MPI, I'd suggest going with the first approach (run multiple MPI programs on a single PC).

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You don't need to have VMs running to launch multiple copies of your application that communicate using MPI .

MPI can help you a virtual cluster on a given single node by launching multiple copies of your applications.

One benifit though, of having it run in a VM is that (as you already mentioned) it provides sand boxing .Thus any issues if your application creates will remain limited to that VM which is running the app copy.