Sowing MPICH: A Case Study in the Dissemination of a Portable Environment for Parallel Scientific Computing

MPICH is an implementation of the MPI specification for a standard message-passing library interface. In this article we focus on the lessons learned from preparing MPICH for diverse parallel computing environments. These lessons include how to prepare software for configuration in unknown environments; how to structure software to absorb contributions by others; how to automate the preparation of man pages, Web pages, and other documentation; how to automate prerelease testing for both correctness and performance; and how to manage the inevitable problem reports with a minimum of resources for support