Ancient MPI implementations, and how to properly install a newer one from source?

Quantumboredom · August 20, 2011, 12:31am

Hello. I have use for an MPI implementation, and it seem that the two that are available for OpenSUSE 11.4 are rather old. OpenMPI is version 1.2.8 (from 2008) and MPICH(1) is version 1.2.7 (from 2005!). As far as I can tell both are no longer supported upstream and both projects encourage switching to newer versions. Why are the MPI implementations in the repositories so old?

Anyway, this means that I would like to compile and install a newer version myself. The process of compiling and installing to some prefix I think won’t be a problem, however I don’t know how I should do it when there is already an MPI implementation installed. On my computer OpenMPI has been installed, presumably because something else depended on it (any way to check if that’s the case?).

My problem then is how to install a newer version of OpenMPI or MPICH2 without messing up the package management and anything that might be depending on the old OpenMPI 1.2.8. Is it even possible, or do I have to install the new version to a place not in default search paths for include files and libraries (a hassle when I want cross-platform compilation with CMake). Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this?

martin_helm · August 20, 2011, 1:17am

You can look into the science repository which contains openmpi 1.3.2
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/science/openSUSE_11.4

Quantumboredom · August 20, 2011, 9:46am

It’s still pretty old (from 2009, also abandoned upstream I think) but at least it’s an improvement. So if I install openmpi from the science repository it would replace the older version, and that would (most likely?) not cause problems with whatever depends on openmpi in the original repos?

martin_helm · August 20, 2011, 11:02am

Quantumboredom wrote:

>
> It’s still pretty old (from 2009, also abandoned upstream I think) but
> at least it’s an improvement. So if I install openmpi from the science
> repository it would replace the older version, and that would (most
> likely?) not cause problems with whatever depends on openmpi in the
> original repos?
>
It should not conflict with the original repositories, that is the point. I
know that it is realtively old. You can also install a newer mpi by
compiling the source or contact the package maintainer for openmpi/mpich and
ask if they are willing to pack a newer version.

martin_helm · August 20, 2011, 11:43am

I just saw that you can find the latest stable release for openmpi for
openSUSE here
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/scorot/openSUSE_11.4

I also checked now the src rpm from the original openmpi page
http://www.open-mpi.org/software/ompi/v1.4/ and it compiles easily with
“rpmbuild --rebuild openmpi-1.4.3-1.src.rpm”.

Quantumboredom · August 20, 2011, 2:12pm

Thanks! I added the science repository and the “scorot” repository you linked to (which is supposed to extend the science repository). Then I did “zypper dup” which upgraded and changed vendors for openmpi and a few other sciency packages. Everything seems to be working fine (I just had to manually change the default MPI implementation in mpi-selector even though there was only one installed).

It’s a little scary having unofficial repositories enabled (everywhere I look it seems people say you shouldn’t do that unless you’re named Linus), but it seems to be working fine for now at least.

Thanks for your help

martin_helm · August 20, 2011, 3:07pm

The general advice not to enable unofficial repos has of course a good
reason. Too many people enable a variety of additional repos too often
without a good reason and are then surprised to introduce conflicts.
On the other hand it makes sense to have this repos for special use cases (I
also have always the scorot repo because I need some libs for scientific
computing which I do not want to compile myself).
After you installed what you want you can of course disable the additional
repos and just enable them if you need again something special or want to
update a package from it.
Have much fun.

gmagnotti · December 5, 2013, 5:25pm

I know this is an old thread but I just wanted to clarify how to install the compiled version of openmpi

I have successfully compiled it but when I execute the following

sudo yum install openmpi-1.4.3.x86_64

I receive the following message:

Setting up Install Process
No package openmpi-1.4.3.x86_64 available.
Nothing to do

Your help in resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

gogalthorp · December 5, 2013, 9:57pm

You do know that yum is not a normal openSUSE program?? It may not work right without extraordinary effort