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

[Woodruff, Robert J]

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. 

So from a technical standpoint,
I do not see a problem with removing MPIs from OFED. I can however
see the benefit of that packaging from a customer point of view
in making it easier to install without having to go get packages
from multiple places.  I personally do not really care either way
as I use Intel MPI for my testing, and 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. 

woody