[ewg] RFC: Do we wish to take MPI out of OFED?

[Pawel Dziekonski]

On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 at 10:14:07AM -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
> On Jun 3, 2009, at 3:39 AM, Pawel Dziekonski wrote:
>> On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 at 10:30:07PM +0300, Tziporet Koren wrote:
>>
>>> Main reasons to keep MPI in OFED:
>>> - All participants test with the same MPI versions, and when installing
>>> OFED it is ensured that MPI will work fine with this version.
>>> - Customers convenience in install (no need to go to more sites to get 
>>> MPI)
>>> - MPI is an important RDMA ULP and although it is not developed in OFA it
>>> is widely used by OFED customers
>>
>> As a customer I strongly support above mentioned pros. It's a
>> guarantee for us that MPI is well tested with OFED release.
>
> MPI makes an effective test bed for the RDMA stack whether it is shipped 
> with it or not. Removing the MPIs from the distribution would not, in all 
> likelihood, change the fact that MPIs would be used to test the RDMA stack 
> prior to release.
>
>> I believe that this effort saves a lot of troubles that would be
>> raised from separate releases of MPI and OFED distros.
>
> If you truly believe this, and you accept that shipping the MPI with
> the RDMA stack is an acceptable solution to the problem, then you
> are encouraging totally craptacular engineering as a customer.
> Since you have a non-US email address, and since craptacular is a
> word I use frequently, but which I also sort of just made up, let me
> define that. Sometimes, things are good. When they are really good,
> they are spectacular. Sometimes, things are crap. When they are
> *really* crap, they are craptacular.
>
> The RDMA stack provides an API. The MPI stacks are nothing more than

you look at the problem from vendor point of view (vendor-like mail
domain? ;). you care about api. i care about mpi.

from technical point of view it is enough for me if you say in ofed
docs that THIS and THAT particular versions of MPI was tested and
WORKS. just like suppoerted and tested list of linux kernels and linux
distros. I definitely can download and compile mpi by myself. however
since you already used some versions of MPI to test the RDMA stack
prior to release why not simply attach it to release? it just makes
the release more complete from CUSTOMER point of view.

cheers, P
-- 
Pawel Dziekonski <pawel.dziekonski at wcss.pl>
Wroclaw Centre for Networking & Supercomputing, HPC Department
Politechnika Wr., pl. Grunwaldzki 9, bud. D2/101, 50-377 Wroclaw, POLAND
phone: +48 71 3202043, fax: +48 71 3225797, http://www.wcss.wroc.pl