#1886: Should update openmpi in F11 prior to final

[Fedora Release Engineering]

#1886: Should update openmpi in F11 prior to final
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  Reporter:  dledford         |       Owner:  rel-eng at lists.fedoraproject.org
      Type:  task             |      Status:  new                            
 Milestone:  Fedora 11 Final  |   Component:  koji                           
Resolution:                   |    Keywords:                                 
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Comment (by dledford):

 A deeper investigation will have to wait until I get back from my appt,
 but blacs very adequately demonstrates the issue of why MPI stacks can't
 be treated the way you are talking about.  It is hard linked against
 openmpi, and yet the changes that you refer to me reverting included
 ongoing usage of the alternatives system to select which MPI stack the
 system wishes to use.  As you can well imaging, you can select Lam or
 mpich or something else as your mpi stack, and the user may have fully
 configured their mpi stack and have it up and running, but since blacs
 will only pick up the openmpi libs, and openmpi may not be configured at
 all, it will in fact fail to operate properly.  In other words, the fact
 that blacs links against one and only one mpi library makes the whole
 usage of alternatives support, or environment modules support as I use,
 irrelevant.

 And Scalapack *is* an mpi app, and is mpi aware, and expects to use the
 mpi runtime.  To support more than one mpi stack under an mpi app like
 that, see what I did with the rhel mpitests package.  You can *not* assume
 that an mpi app linked against one mpi stack will work against another,
 you have to include buildrequires for all the mpi stacks you want to
 support, and build against each stack, and then create packages specific
 to the mpi stack you built against.

 So, I guess at this point we can take our pick: support more than one mpi
 stack in Fedora and live with the fact that some assumptions don't hold
 true in a multi-mpi stack environment, or declare fedora a one and only
 one mpi stack distribution and let those assumptions stand.

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Ticket URL: <https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/1886#comment:8>
Fedora Release Engineering <http://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng>
Release Engineering for the Fedora Project