Hi Rob,
Open MPI *should* work just fine on older hardware. However, as far
as I know none of the developers regularly run on older hardware. So
my advice is to try it, and decide whether it is right for your
environment. If you have any issues please post them to the Open MPI
users mailing list.
I guess I can't tell you if it is 'worth' upgrading the existing
setup to Open MPI. This really depends on your specific setup, what
features you use, etc. Personally I usually follow the "if it ain't
broke don't fix it" mentality, but if Open MPI has features you want
it might be worth upgrading.
Good luck!
Tim
On Feb 15, 2007, at 12:35 PM, Rob Malpass wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I'm looking for some basic help with a fresh open-mpi
> installation. Main question first and background to follow:
>
> Is open-mpi as tolerant of heterogeneous low spec hardware as lam was?
>
> I sysadmin a small cluster for a research company. The project
> for which this cluster is required drifts in and out of importance
> and as such, our last install (back in 2002) was lam-6.5.9 - which
> worked fine on an 8 node cluster running Slackware 7.1. Some were
> as old as Pentium 1-120s with 12 Mb of RAM ranging up to P3-666 and
> 128Mb of RAM. As I say, it all hung together well and did the job.
>
> The programmers tell me they now need open-mpi as subsequent
> releases of lam refused to compile on this hardware - not sure why
> (lack of RAM I guess) but as a humble sysadmin, I don't want to get
> too far into it - as long as I did:
>
> ./configure
> make all
> make install
>
> and setup appropriate permissions on each node - it worked!
>
> So if we decide to use openmpi instead of lam, is it worth
> bothering with the existing hardware? To be fair, the Pentium 1's
> have now been dropped but all of the "new" hardware is around the
> P3 spec with 64-128Mb of RAM.
>
> Any constructive help gratefully received - but before you ask - no
> - the company isn't about to buy any new high-end workstations to
> replace this old kit! They would rather stick with lam on old kit
> than buy new kit to allow openmpi to run.
>
> Cheers
> Rob
>
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