In r6731, I added the first of three modifications to the rsh pls:
1. If your remote shell is sh (i.e., plain Bourne shell -- *not* bash),
the rsh pls will first invoke "! [ -e ./.profile ] || . ./.profile"
before invoking the orted (because "sh" does not invoke *any* shell
startup files on the remote node for non-interactive rsh/ssh logins --
see the LAM FAQ for details:
http://www.lam-mpi.org/faq/category4.php3#question8). This behavior
has a long-standing precedent in LAM/MPI (about a decade or so).
This gives the user the chance to setup PATH / LD_LIBRARY_PATH in their
.profile.
Two more changes will be coming soon:
2. Right now, the rsh pls assumes that your shell on the remote node is
the same as your shell on the local node. So we look at the shell on
the local node to determine if we need to source .profile on the remote
node. An enhancement to this is to allow the rsh pls to probe the
shell on the remote node to accurately determine what it is (i.e.,
execute "ssh node echo $SHELL" and look at the output). This also has
a long-standing precedent in LAM/MPI.
However, I think we can make the behavior described in #1 be the
default (assume the remote shell is the same as the local shell) --
this is certainly the common case. We can provide an MCA param for
users who need the "probe" behavior (which we'll probably need it for
multi-cell scenarios, for example).
3. Rainer and I started on a new command line flag to orterun last
week: --prefix <dir>. This allows the user to specify the installation
directory of Open MPI on the remote node, allowing us to set PATH and
LD_LIBRARY_PATH on the remote node as necessary. Hence, users don't
need to modify their shell startup files (.bashrc, .profile, .cshrc,
etc.) to specify the path to the Open MPI installation on the remote
side.
These last two features will take a bit of time to implement -- they're
a little complicated. #3 is actually more pressing than #2, and will
probably be implemented first.
--
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} The Open MPI Project
{+} http://www.open-mpi.org/
