On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Wa-Kun Lam wrote:
> I need your help! I have taken over a parallel network have 8 nodes
> installed on it. However, the version of LAM/MPI on each node is too old
> (6.5.6). I am going to upgrade it to 7.0. However, I have a little bit
> worrying about the upgrading will destroy some configuation.
There is actually very little configuration that LAM stores outside of its
executables. So installing LAM/MPI 7.0 over an existing older LAM/MPI
installation should typically be fine.
> I have tried it in my own computer. I find that if just install the new
> version to cover the old one. When I run lamboot, it still call the old
> version.
If this is the case, then you have not installed 7.0 "over" the old one --
i.e., you now seem to have both installed, and your $PATH is set to find
the "old" one first.
Check your $PATH and ensure that you are using the version of LAM that you
think you are using. It may be easiest to uninstall the old version of
LAM.
> On the other hand, I also try to add my own computer (with 7.0
> installed) to the parallel network. It seems that different versions of
> LAM are not compatible ????. So
Different versions of LAM are not binary compatible, although they are
source compatible. See the LAM FAQ (http://www.lam-mpi.org) under "LAM
Versions", in particular, the question "Can I mix different versions of
LAM?"
> 1) What's the correct way to upgrade LAM/MPI(All the release are
> installed with compliation in tar and the source was delected)? I am
> using Redhat 7.2. Some libraries needed in LAM 7.0 maybe too old, isn't
> it? Should I upgrade the libraries (like glibc, openssh, etc.) first?
Bottom line: If you compile LAM 7.0 from source, it shouldn't have any
problems with the libraries and utilties in RH 7.2.
This question actually quickly digresses into the philosophy of upgrading
the OS and whatnot, which is somewhat outside of the scope of LAM/MPI.
If you choose to upgrade the individual elements of RH 7.2 (glibc,
openssh), that's fine -- a previously-installed version LAM may or may not
have any problems with those upgrades (e.g., if you upgrade to a version
of glibc that has known incompatabilities with prior versions). This is
not a problem unique to LAM -- if you upgrade to an incompatible version
of glibc (for example), you may have problems running other programs as
well. *Usually*, RH takes care to provide nice upgrade paths -- that if
you upgrade glibc with RH-supplied RPMs, all binaries on the system
(including LAM) should continue to work fine.
However, if you upgrade various systems in RH 7.2 and then compile/install
LAM from source, it should work fine (because it will be linked against
all the new/upgraded systems).
Finally, a word of warning: upgrading glibc is not a trivial thing. Be
warned -- if something goes wrong, you can have a totally unusable system
(since many, many things use glibc).
> 2) Because I can't run 7.0 in a 6.5.6-network, so I have also tried a
> lower version 6.5.9 in rpm format. It's werid that after installion,
> though it's all right to boot LAM, running the MPI program have some
> problem. Besides ouputing the results, I also got some message like
> "Something wrong in the binary ..., you have to fix it first..."
Correct. Same issue as above -- 6.5.6 is not binary compatible with
6.5.9. You must have the same version of LAM/MPI installed on all nodes.
--
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} jsquyres_at_[hidden]
{+} http://www.lam-mpi.org/
|
