I am trying to port a MS VC++ program to run on a rocks cluster! I am not very good with linux but I am eager to learn and I imagine porting it wouldn't be an impossible task for me. However, I do not understand how to take advantage of the cluster nodes. because it seems that the code execute only runs on the front end server (obviously).

I have read a little about MPI and its seems like I should use MPI to comminicate between nodes. The program is currently written such that I have a main thread that synchronizes all worker threads. The main thread also recieves commands to manipulate the simulation or query its state. If the simulation is properly setup, communication between executing threads can be significantly minimized. What I don't understand is how do I start the process on the compute nodes and how do I handle failures in nodes? And maybe there should be other things I should also consider when porting my program to run in a cluster?