* What is MUSIC?

MUSIC is an API allowing large scale neuron simulators using MPI
internally to exchange data during runtime.  MUSIC provides mechanisms
to transfer massive amounts of event information and continuous values
from one parallel application to another.  Special care has been taken
to ensure that existing simulators can be adapted to MUSIC.  In
particular, MUSIC handles data transfer between applications that use
different time steps and different data allocation strategies.

This is the MUSIC pilot implementation.

The two most important components built from this software
distribution are the music library `libmusic.a' and the music utility
`music'.  A MUSIC-aware simulator links against the C++ library and
can be launched using mpirun together with the music utility as
described below.  MUSIC can also be used from a C program using the
API in music-c.h.

MUSIC is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.


* Required external packages

MUSIC is written in C++ and makes use of the MPI message passing
library.  MUSIC has been tested with versions 1.2 and 1.3 of OpenMPI,
mpich and on BG/L.  A visualization tool `viewevents' can be built if
the GLUT toolkit is installed.

MUSIC version 1.0 makes use of the "long long" data type supported by,
for example, the GNU C++ compiler g++.


* Getting started

MUSIC can be built and installed using the generic installation
instructions found in the file INSTALL.  At the top of the source
distribution directory, do:

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=<PREFIX>
make
make install

(On some UNIX distributions you might need to run `ldconfig' or define
LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

for the music utility to find its library.)

A MUSIC co-simulation is specified in a configuration file given as
the first argument to the music utility.  The test subdirectory
contains a collection of examples, for example:

cd test
mpirun -np 4 /usr/local/bin/music demo.music

On some systems, this way of invoking a MUSIC co-simulation isn't
supported. Se blow for an alternative method.


* Compilation and linking flags

configure.ac contains mechanisms which try to identify which MPI
implementation/environment is in use and, based on this, decide
automagically which compiler, compilation flags and linking flags to
use. To circumvent, pass variable definitions ro configure, e.g.:

  ./configure MPI_CXXFLAGS="-g -O3"

The variables are:

MPI_CXX       The compiler to use for MPI code
MPI_CXXFLAGS  C++ compilation flags
MPI_CFLAGS    C compilation flags
MPI_LDFLAGS   Linking flags


* Python support

MUSIC comes with Python bindings. By default, the configure script
looks for a Python interpreter in the path. If you want to use a
particular Python interpreter, you can specify the path to it using
the option --with-python:

./configure --with-python=/my/bin/python

Python support can be disabled using:

./configure --without-python


* Porting

When launching a set of applications in a co-simulation, MUSIC needs
to go outside the MPI standard in two respects:

1. It needs to know the MPI process rank of the running process before
calling MPI::Init.

2. It needs to extract the first argument given to the music utility
before calling MPI::Init.

The configuration script tries to figure out which MPI distribution is
installed and how to compiler MUSIC for that distribution.  The
subdirectory mpidep contains all non-standard code.  If you are trying
to port the MUSIC library to a new version of MPI, please supply new
definitions for the functions getRank and getConfig in
mpidep/mpidep.c.  For more details, see the file PORTING in this
directory.


* Alternative way to invoke MUSIC co-simulations

In case the method of launching MUSIC described under "Getting
started" above fails, there is an alternative method:

Let's assume that we want to launch application A with binary a and Na
processes, and application B with binary b and Nb processes. These are
listed in a standard MUSIC config file ab.music with block labels A
and B. The standard way to launch these would be:

  mpirun -np <Na+Nb> music ab.music

(where <Na+Nb> is a number). These can alternatively be launched in
MPMD style as:

  mpirun -np Na ./a --music-config ab.music --app-label A : -np Nb ./b --music-config ab.music --app-label B


* Where to find more information

The MUSIC manual and other information can be found on the MUSIC wiki:

  https://github.com/INCF/MUSIC/wiki

Questions and requests can be sent to [email protected].


* Submitting bug reports

Bug reports should be submitted as issues on the MUSIC github page:

  https://github.com/INCF/MUSIC/issues