Hi all -
There have been a couple of inquiries about running LAM/MPI on Mac OS X
10.4 "Tiger", so I thought I would post a short bit on what does and
does not work. Note that this is only for LAM/MPI -- you should also
check on how well other applications work before deciding whether to
upgrade right away or not.
Compiling a 32 bit version of LAM/MPI on Tiger should work without any
problems. I've done some testing with both the gcc 3.3 and 4.0
compilers, and there doesn't seem to be a problem there. Note that gcc
4.0 continues the trend of pickier and pickier compilers, so if you
bend the C standard a little bit in your application, you might have
some clean up work to do ;).
Compiling LAM/MPI for 64 bits on Tiger is slightly more complicated.
There is a bug in one of the more obscure ioctl() calls that LAM uses
at bootup, causing lamboot to hang indefinitely. A patch is available
at the URL below which should work around the problem. The patch can
cause lamboot to take slightly longer to complete if the ioctl is
broken (this time can be greatly reduced if you make sure the host you
are running lamboot on appears early in the hostfile you provide). The
patch should apply on top of any 7.0 or 7.1 release.
http://www.lam-mpi.org/~brbarret/lam-tiger/boot-ioctl.diff
There also appears to be an issue with System V semaphores when
compiling in 64 bit mode. There is no workaround for this bug, other
than to avoid using the sysv and usysv RPIs when running in 64 bit
mode. Symptoms of the bug are random deadlocks during MPI
applications. Apple is aware of both issues, so hopefully they will be
resolved in the near future.
Finally, the LAM/MPI build structure does not presently support
building a dual 32 bit / 64 bit libmpi.dylib. It appears that doing so
would take a significant amount of effort, and will probably not be
done in the foreseeable future. The workaround is, of course, to have
two installs of LAM/MPI, one compiled for 32 bit the other for 64 bit.
If you run into any problems other than the ones listed above, please
let us know. I'd also like to thank everyone at Apple for helping us
make sure LAM/MPI and Open MPI would work as well as they do out of the
box on Tiger.
Brian
--
Brian Barrett
LAM/MPI developer and all around nice guy
Have a LAM/MPI day: http://www.lam-mpi.org/
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