[mpich-devel] Future of MPE?

[Pavan Balaji]

On Oct 16, 2013, at 12:37 PM, Lisandro Dalcin wrote:
> I'm failing to see the problem. After core MPICH (+ROMIO) is
> configured, it seems to me there is enough information to configure
> MPE without testing for any MPI feature.

Not really.  For example, when MPI-I/O support is disabled, MPE cannot have/use MPI-I/O wrappers.

In general, a package sitting on top of MPI should do feature tests for various parts of MPI (e.g., MPI-1, MPI-2, and MPI-3) and enable features that are available.  This, however, assumes that the MPI implementation is fully installed and ready to be tested.  Before mpich is installed, this is hard to do in the MPE configure.

Yes, it is true that we do this in ROMIO (and in the MPICH test suite), but that doesn't make it a good idea.  Unfortunately, it'll be too disruptive for users if we stopped doing this for ROMIO.  But I don't think it's that much of a problem for MPE.  Users should view MPE as a separate software product (by the same group, yes, but still a separate product).  You should install MPI (MPICH or something else), and then build MPE against that MPI implementation.

  -- Pavan

--
Pavan Balaji
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~balaji