When you first get your Myrinet equipment and have installed the software, you should test your hardware. The high-level test procedure described here also serves as an example of how to use some of the Myrinet tools. Make sure you have read the documentation for these tools before you use them. If anything goes wrong in the test you should figure out what is wrong before you continue. If a board doesn't work in loopback, there is no point in trying to get TCP/IP to work.

Connect a loopback cable to your Myrinet board. If you don't have a loopback cable you can make one. See the Myrinet Links and Routing Specification section on Cables.

If you are using Solaris, plumb the board.

metis 36% su Password: # ifconfig myri0 plumb # exit metis 37%

Turn off the Myrinet TCP/IP driver.

metis 35% su Password: # ifconfig myri0 down # exit metis 36%

Use mload to load an MCP into the board.

metis 38% mload -u 0 -a 1 ~/myrinet/lib/lanai/mcp4.dat
metis 39% 

Stare at the back of the board. The left LED should be green, and once every 10 seconds or so it should flash orange. The right LED is not used, and its color doesn't mean anything.

Use mversion to determine the version string of the MCP you loaded.

metis 41% mversion -u 0
mcp4 Jan 22 1996 10:30:49
metis 42% 

mversion should return "mcp4" and a timestamp. Verify that this version is the same version as the one in the MCP file you just loaded

metis 42% mversion -f ~/myrinet/lib/lanai/mcp.dat
mcp4 Jan 22 1996 10:30:49

If the versions are not the same, you made a mistake in loading the MCP somehow.

Now start the Myrinet monitoring program, mmon.

metis 43% cd ~/myrinet/lib/lanai
metis 44% mmon&
[3] 387
metis 45% 

Select "File:Open mcp.dat" and use the file selection box that comes up to select the name of the MCP file you loaded into the board. Then select "Special:Counters". This will bring up a dialog box showing the some important MCP counters. The counters, "Map Messages Sent" and "Map Messages Received" should be equal, and increasing, at about the rate of once every 10 seconds. These two counters show that the MCP is mapping the 1-node Myrinet consisting of a board connected to a loopback cable. The "Host Interrupts" counter is probably increasing. This counter shows that the MCP is trying to wake up the Myrinet TCP/IP driver, which you put to sleep with "ifconfig myri0 down". The flags "The Map is Valid" and "The Routes are Valid" should both be set to 1. "Bad CRC" and "Bad Length" should be low, and unchanging. (These counters should only change when you unplug cables.)

Now that you have seen that the MCP is mapping itself, press "Mapping" in mmon. You should see an icon of a computer. This icon represents the single node on the Myrinet loopback network.

Press "Continuous". Now mmon will update its network map continuously. You can control the rate of this updating by moving the slider on the top of the mmon window. By default it is 1.0, or once per second.

Use host_test to send packets through the loopback cable

metis 56% host_test -u 0 -da 1 -k

On the "Counters" window the counters "Host Sends", "Host Receives", "Net Sends", and "Net Receives" should all be increasing, and they should all be about equal. If "Host Receives" is less than "Net Receives" then these missing packets should (roughly) show up as "Host Drops". The main thing is that "Bad Length", "Bad CRC", and "FRESes" should not change.

Kill host_test.

^CHost Test Results:
Message Size:      8448.
Messages Sent:     1387.
Messages Received: 1336. 

If host_test complains about bad packet contents or order then something is wrong.