[ofa-general] Bare minimum install

[Christopher Tanner]

All -

I have been handed a cluster that has Mellanox Infiniband cards and  
Ubuntu 8.04 and I've been trying to install the necessary software to  
get it to communicate. I think I need to start from ground zero as I  
have no idea how Infiniband works and what is / isn't necessary for my  
system.

Assuming I have absolutely no Infiniband software on my system (i.e.  
fresh OS install):
a) What OFED packages are absolutely necessary for my MPI applications  
(i.e. LS-DYNA) to use IB using MVAPICH2 or OpenMPI?

b) Will installing the Infiniband software on an NFS mount decrease  
its usefulness? (assuming IPoIB is not setup) Would it be best to  
install the Infiniband software on the local drive of each node?

c) What OFED packages are necessary to setup IPoIB? For a small  
cluster (16 nodes), is IPoIB even worth the trouble?

d) Is there a document that describes, in simple terms, how Infiniband  
works so that I know why I'm installing certain packages and how to  
manually configure the system? (Automated install doesn't work with  
Ubuntu)

For those who have helped me in the past, thank you. I'm starting  
again from ground zero since everything I tried beforehand didn't work.

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Chris Tanner
Space Systems Design Lab
Georgia Institute of Technology
christopher.tanner at gatech.edu
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