[ofa-general] Re: [ewg] RFC: Do we wish to take MPI out of OFED?
Jeff Squyres
jsquyres at cisco.com
Tue Jun 9 04:38:05 PDT 2009
On Jun 8, 2009, at 6:59 AM, Todd Rimmer wrote:
> I agree with DK from OSU. There are clear advantages to having MPI
> included with OFED. Not only will it make testing of a complete
> solution easier by both OFED and MPI suppliers,
>
Can you specify how, specifically?
Remember that all that Open MPI and MVAPICH do is provide SRPMs.
There is no co-mingling of development / source trees, for example.
You seem to be blurring the distinction between co-development of MPI
+OpenFabrics and shipping OFED. Developing the two together is a Good
Thing -- and that happens. But that is unrelated to shipping the
MPI's in OFED.
As has been specified multiple times on this thread, using MPI to test
verbs is a Good Thing and it can easily be maintained without
distributing MPI in OFED.
> but it will also improve ease of use for end users.
>
Can you specify how, specifically?
Recall that:
- Open MPI users get a stripped-down version with several important
features disabled
- At least one user has chimed in that they install MPI separately
from OFED for a variety of reasons (I have seen this at customer sites
as well)
> As DK points out there are continual improvements in MPIs which may
> depend on bug fixes and/or new features in newer versions of OFED.
> Identifying a known good combination will be important to most end
> users, etc.
>
Easy to do in documentation and/or in the technology of the MPI
implementations themselves. The verbs API should allow this kind of
run-time checking as a matter of course (and it seems to allow it well
enough).
Additionally -- and your later comments seemed to support it --
possibly the most important combination that needs to work is that of
<latest OFED> + <latest MPI>, which will continue to work because OFED
would be insane to remove MPI from its testing/QA/release process.
--
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems
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