Preface

Welcome to the Programmer's Guide. It is written for use by the Scyld ClusterWare cluster application programmer. In this document we outline the important interfaces, services, and mechanisms made available to the programmer by the Scyld ClusterWare system software.

In many cases, many of the relevant interfaces are the same as on any standard parallel computing platform. For example, most of the MPI interface provided by MPICH is the same on Scyld ClusterWare as on any cluster. In these cases, this document will refer to relevant documentation for the details. In some cases, while the interface may be the same, subtle differences in Scyld's implementation compared to other implementations will be discussed.

The interfaces discussed in this document include those that might be pertinent to application programs in addition to those that might be used by system programmers developing servers or environments. In all cases, it is assumed that the readers of this document are intent on developing programs. Most information of interest to more casual users or administrators may be found in the User's Guide or the Administrator's Guide.