PETSc Debian package switch to lam, openmpi, or something else?
Greetings,
I would like to revisit an issue last discussed here six years ago, see
http://lists.debian.org/debian-beowulf/2001/06/msg00071.html
Back then, the reasons to stay with mpich vs. switching to lam included:
* standards conformance (mpich as the reference implementation)
* vendor preference (many other MPI implementations are based on
mpich)
* performance (though tests run at the time showed them very even)
* ease of setup (no need to lamboot etc.)
Recently, a new motivation has emerged to switch to lam: the petsc4py
python bindings work with lam, but not with mpich; openmpi is not yet
tested. So I would like to revisit this question with the list again,
and if there are no concerns or objections, to switch to lam or openmpi
as the default MPI implementation for PETSc. I am open to suggestions
on which of these is better to use, I suspect openmpi.
Regarding the possibility of more than one in the repository, the answer
is no. With eleven architectures (and more on the way, thanks to
kfreebsd and hurd), PETSc takes more than 70 MiB per distribution, and
we have four distributions now (oldstable, stable, testing, unstable).
For a package with 44 users out of 53,323 on popcon (for the most
popular PETSc binary), I am not going to consider taking any more mirror
space than we have now.
Furthermore, I've gone out of my way to make it very easy to build with
alternative MPI implementations, just do "debian/rules PETSC_MPI=lam
binary" (or in the future PETSC_MPI=mpich if lam is the default).
Thanks for your input.
Regards,
-Adam
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