[ofa-general] RE: [ewg] RFC: Do we wish to take MPI out of OFED?

[Doug Ledford]

On Sun, 2009-06-07 at 13:51 -0700, Woodruff, Robert J wrote:
> Doug wrote, 
> 
> >One minor clarification, it's not so much the RPM packaging that makes
> >things difficult, it's the compatibility matrix.  Since things aren't
> >designed to cleanly inter-operate with each other in anything other than
> >very specific combinations, it means that updates are an all or nothing
> >affair.  This is in direct contrast to the rest of our entire operating
> >system where we isolate and target things that need fixed and only
> >things that need fixed.
> 
> I think this was true early on with the OFA and OFED releases, but
> I do think things are stabilizing in this area as the code has
> matured and thus I think that having various components decoupled
> should be easier going forward. 

For most things this is true, but not for all.

> BTW, Intel MPI has always
> been decoupled and we have not seen this to be a problem. We have
> recommended people install newer versions of OFED from time to time
> as MPI found bugs that were fixed in the newer OFED, but it was
> not the API that was not stable, it was just bugs that were found
> that required a newer OFED version. 

I don't know the particulars of how Intel MPI is distributed, built,
etc.  But, when you tell me that you have from time to time recommended
customers install a later version of OFED to get a bug fix, I get the
impression that you start off by telling customers that OFED is a
prerequisite to running Intel MPI in the first place.  If that's the
case, then I would question whether that's decoupled from OFED, or just
not in the OFED tarball.

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband

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