VirtualBox -> Ubuntu 8.04 -> LINPACK Benchmark

After watching this video, I have an urge to run the LINPACK benchmark on my new notebook with Ubuntu as guest OS in VirtualBox.

To run LINPACK benchmark, you need to install MPICH (A Portable Implementation of MPI, Message Passing Interface). Installation of MPICH is really easy in Ubuntu and you do not need to go through the compilation phase. Simply launch the Synaptic Package Manager (located at System->Administration) and select "mpich 1.2.7-8 , MPI parallel computing system implementation" package to install. It is dead simple.

LINPACK benchmark does not come with binary and therefore you need to compile it on your target system. You will need to download these dependencies - BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprogram), ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software). Configure LINPACK to point to the BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprogram) and ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software) library by setting the "MPdir", "MPinc", "MPlib", "LAdir", "LAinc" and "LAlib" variables in the Make file specific to your architecture.

To run the benchmark, run mpirun -np 1 xhpl. Remember to configure the HPL.dat to fit your environment. I am running off 1 CPU because I get VirtualBox to allocate 1 CPU worth of compute power (I only have 2 cores). I did not finish the entire run because the heat generated on my laptop is "too hot for me to handle". Anyway, this is the screenshot.

This is the video that I watched
An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future