The Interop Working Group (IWG) of the OpenFabrics Alliance asked me
to bring a question to the Open MPI user and developer communities: is
anyone interested in having a single MPI job span HCAs or RNICs from
multiple vendors? (pardon the cross-posting, but I did want to ask
each group separately -- because the answers may be different)
The interop testing lab at the University of New Hampshire (http://www.iol.unh.edu/services/testing/ofa/
) discovered that most (all?) MPI implementations fail when having a
single MPI job span HCAs from multiple vendors and/or span RNICs from
multiple vendors. I don't remember the exact details (and they may
not be public, anyway), but I'm pretty sure that OMPI failed when used
with QLogic and Mellanox HCAs in a single MPI job. This is fairly
unsurprising, given how we tune Open MPI's use of OpenFabrics-capable
hardware based on our .ini file.
So my question is: does anyone want/need to support jobs that span
HCAs from multiple vendors and/or RNICs from multiple vendors?
--
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems
