Hi, I just would like to known if this functionality (a prefix field in hostfile if i understand well ) has been integrated in the 1.2.4 ?? Thanks for your answer
------- On Mar 22, 2007, at 10:38 AM, Ralph Castain wrote: We had a nice chat about this on the OpenRTE telecon this morning. The question of what to do with multiple prefix's has been a long-running issue, most recently captured in bug trac report #497. The problem is that prefix is intended to tell us where to find the ORTE/OMPI executables, and therefore is associated with a node - not an app_context. What we haven't been able to define is an appropriate notation that a user can exploit to tell us the association. This issue has arisen on several occasions where either (a) users have heterogeneous clusters with a common file system, so the prefix must be adjusted on each *type* of node to point to the correct type of binary; and (b) for whatever reason, typically on rsh/ssh clusters, users have installed the binaries in different locations on some of the nodes. In this latter case, the reports have been from homogeneous clusters, so the *type* of binary was never the issue - it just wasn't located where we expected. Sun's solution is (I believe) what most of us would expect - they locate their executables in the same relative location on all their nodes. The binary in that location is correct for that local architecture. This requires, though, that the "prefix" location not be on a common file system. Unfortunately, that isn't the case with LANL's roadrunner, nor can we expect that everyone will follow that sensible approach :-). So we need a notation to support the "exception" case where someone needs to truly specify prefix versus node(s). We discussed a number of options, including auto-detecting the local arch and appending it to the specified "prefix" and several others. After discussing them, those of us on the call decided that adding a field to the hostfile that specifies the prefix to use on that host would be the best solution. This could be done on a cluster-level basis, so - although it is annoying to create the data file - at least it would only have to be done once. Again, this is the exception case, so requiring a little inconvenience seems a reasonable thing to do. Anyone have heartburn and/or other suggestions? If not, we might start to play with this next week. We would have to do some small modifications to the RAS, RMAPS, and PLS components to ensure that any multi-prefix info gets correctly propagated and used across all platforms for consistent behavior. Ralph
