If you already have LAM installed and configured on your system, and if you know how to operate it, you can skip right to section 2.7, and then go to the first lesson. If you don't have LAM or if you haven't used it before, read on. The remainder of this section provides you with sufficient pointers, I hope, to obtain and install LAM. It also tells you how to operate the LAM engine. Only the minimum of LAM related knowledge is covered necessary to run simple MPI jobs, so that we can focus on MPI itself as quickly as possible.