Upon reflecting on this more, I guess I see two issues. First, there's
the issue of allowing the user to install our software on the system
where ever they like. Some users may want to install it in their home
directories, others may have a sys admin install it in a common
location. This seems like a substantial reason to allow an OMPI
installation to be relocated. So, I would say this was a very important
capability.
On the other hand, I don't have access to all the third party headers
and libraries which are necessary to build some of the more interesting
OMPI modules, such as the Infiniband and Myrinet drivers and many of the
batch scheduling drivers (tm? LoadLeveler? PORTALS? Xgrid? [I'm not sure
what these are]. And maybe a related question: One customer uses NQS
(NQE?); can this be supported?) So, I would expect the user may want to
compile at least some of OMPI himself (or herself) in order to activate
these modules. Thus, perhaps I should supply a partially built
installation which completes compilation as part of the installation
process? This seems somewhat impractical since it would require
compilers, headers and libraries, etc, on every machine on which our
software is installed.
I also don't know what distribution restrictions are placed on all the
3rd party software OMPI can link against. This may limit what can be
redistributed with our product.
So, I guess I'm open to suggestions on how best to distribute our
software. Being able to relocate an installation and being able to build
specific modules at installation time would appear to be very helpful
capabilities.
Many thanks,
Allen
On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 19:45 -0500, Jeff Squyres wrote:
> Greetings Allen.
>
> This problem has not yet been resolved, but I'm quite sure we have an
> open ticket about this on our bug tracker. I just replied to Patrick
> on-list about a related issue (his use of --prefix); I'd have to
> think about this a bit more, but a solution proposed by one of the
> other OMPI developers in internal conversations may fix both issues.
> It only hasn't been coded up because we didn't prioritize it high.
>
> So my question to you is -- how high of a priority is this for you?
> Part of what makes it into each OMPI release is driven by what users
> want/need, so input like this helps us prioritize the work.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> On Dec 13, 2006, at 10:37 AM, Allen Barnett wrote:
>
> > There was a thread back in November started by Patrick Jessee about
> > relocating an installation after it was built (the subject was:
> > removing
> > hard-coded paths from OpenMPI shared libraries). I guess I'm in the
> > same
> > boat now. I would like to distribute our OpenMPI-based parallel
> > solver;
> > but I can't really dictate where a user will install our software. Has
> > any one succeeded in building a version of OpenMPI which can be
> > relocated?
>
--
Allen Barnett
Transpire, Inc.
E-Mail: al...@transpireinc.com
Ph: 518-887-2930
