An important component of MPICH's portability is the ability to build it in
the same way in many different environments. We rely on the existence of
a Bourne shell sh (or superset) and Unix-style
make on the user's machine. The sh
script that the user runs is constructed by GNU's autoconf, which we
need in our development environment, but which the user does not need. At
least a vanilla version of MPICH can be built in any of MPICH's target
environments by going to the top-level directory of the distribution and
issuing the commands
configure
make
The configure script will determine aspects of the environment (such as the
location of certain include files), perform tests of the environment to ensure
that all components required for the correct compilation and execution of
MPICH programs are present, and construct the appropriate Makefiles in
many directories, so that the make command will build MPICH. After
being built and tested, MPICH can be installed in a publicly available
location such as /usr/local with make install. Painless building
and installation has become one of our pet goals for MPICH.