On 2/1/2011 5:02 PM, Jeffrey A Cummings wrote:
I use OpenMPI on a variety of platforms: stand-alone servers running
Solaris on sparc boxes and Linux (mostly CentOS) on AMD/Intel boxes,
also Linux (again CentOS) on large clusters of AMD/Intel boxes. These
platforms all have some version of the 1.3 OpenMPI stream. I recently
requested an upgrade on all systems to 1.4.3 (for production work) and
1.5.1 (for experimentation). I'm getting a lot of push back from the
SysAdmin folks claiming that OpenMPI is closely intertwined with the
specific version of the operating system and/or other system software
(i.e., Rocks on the clusters). I need to know if they are telling me the
truth or if they're just making excuses to avoid the work. To state my
question another way: Apparently each release of Linux and/or Rocks
comes with some version of OpenMPI bundled in. Is it dangerous in some
way to upgrade to a newer version of OpenMPI? Thanks in advance for any
insight anyone can provide.
Jeff:
The issue is that the way Rocks integrates MPI stacks, it is quite
hard to upgrade the baseline stacks.
This said, there is no issue in placing new stacks in
/shared/openmpi/version/compiler/ or similar. We've done this for many
of our Rocks customers.
For Rocks, the admins usually need RPMs, then they have to work on
some extend-compute.xml magic to make it work. You can do this, or as I
did when we ran on a shared Rocks cluster that the admin was ... er ...
reluctant ... to make needed changes. You can easily install it to your
home directory. No admin needed for this. Worked nicely. Solved our
problems.
Regards,
Joe
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics Inc.,
email: land...@scalableinformatics.com
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