Can we run MPI programs in single system or is it imperative to run it in a cluster only?

I have access to a clustered network at my college using PelicanHPC where In run various MPI programs, but at home I want to practice writing/using other MPI programs. Is there a 开发者_如何学编程way that I can run MPI programs on my own system?

(I work on Ubuntu Jaunty)

So according to http://idea.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix/, on PelicanHPC "The LAM-MPI and OpenMPI implementations of MPI are installed."

I don't know about LAM-MPI, but I know OpenMPI will automatically balance threads across multiple processors, as long as you don't ask for more threads than processors. This means that with a dual-core computer, you can "mpirun -n 2" to your heart's content. However, if you want to "mpirun -n 8" with true parallelism, you'd need 4 dual-core boxes.

This will depend on the MPI runtime you use (you will need the runtime - something like mpich). I guess in any case you can run the program in several processes, but if you run more processes then you have processor cores you will have less parallelism.