6.0.2 Running MOLPRO on parallel computers

MOLPRO will run on distributed-memory multiprocessor systems, including workstation clusters, under the control of the Global Arrays parallel toolkit. There are also some parts of the code that can take advantage of shared memory parallelism through the OpenMP protocol, although these are somewhat limited, and this facility is not at present recommended. It should be noted that there remain some parts of the code that are not, or only partly, parallelized, and therefore run with replicated work. Additionally, some of those parts which have been parallelized rely on fast inter-node communications, and can be very inefficient across ordinary networks. Therefore some caution and experimentation is needed to avoid waste of resources in a multiuser environment.

Molpro can be compiled in three different ways:

1. Serial execution only. In this case, no parallelism is possible at run time.
2. `MPP': a number of copies of the program execute simultaneously a single task. For example, a single CCSD(T) calculation can run in parallel, with the work divided between the processors in order to achieve a reduced elapsed time.
3. `MPPX': a number of copies of the program run in serial executing identical independent tasks. An example of this is the calculation of gradients and frequencies by finite difference: for the initial wavefunction calculation, the calculation is replicated on all processes, but thereafter each process works in serial on a different displaced geometry. At present, this is implemented only for numerical gradients and Hessians.

Which of these three modes is available is fixed at compilation time, and is reported in the job output. The options, described below, for selecting the number and location of processors are identical for MPP and MPPX.