Thanks for the clarification everyone.
Tim
On Monday 05 November 2007 05:41:00 pm Torsten Hoefler wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 05:32:04PM -0500, Brian W. Barrett wrote:
> > On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Torsten Hoefler wrote:
> > > On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 04:57:19PM -0500, Brian W. Barrett wrote:
> > >> This is extremely tricky to do. How do you know which environment
> > >> variables to forward (foo in this case) and which not to (hostname).
> > >> SLURM has a better chance, since it's linux only and generally only
> > >> run on tightly controlled clusters. But there's a whole variety of
> > >> things that shouldn't be forwarded and that list differs from OS to
> > >> OS.
> > >>
> > >> I believe we toyed around with the "right thing" in LAM and early on
> > >> with OPen MPI and decided that it was too hard to meet expected
> > >> behavior.
> > >
> > > Some applications rely on this (I know at least two right away, Gamess
> > > and Abinit) and they work without problems with Lam/Mpich{1,2} but not
> > > with Open MPI. I am *not* arguing that those applications are correct
> > > (I agree that this way of passing arguments is ugly, but it's done).
> > >
> > > I know it's not defined in the standard but I think it's a nice
> > > convenient functionality. E.g., setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find
> > > libmpi.so in the .bashrc is also a pain if you have multiple (Open)
> > > MPIs installed.
> >
> > LAM does not automatically propogate environment variables -- it's
> > behavior is almost *exactly* like Open MPI's. There might be a situation
> > where the environment is not quite so scrubbed if a process is started on
> > the same node mpirun is executed on, but it's only appearances -- in
> > reality, that's the environment that was alive when lamboot was executed.
>
> ok, I might have executed it on the same node (was a while ago).
>
> > With both LAM and Open MPI, there is the -x option to propogate a list of
> > environment variables, but that's about it. Neither will push
> > LD_LIBRARY_PATH by default (and there are many good reasons for that,
> > particularly in heterogeneous situations).
>
> Ah, heterogeneous! Yes, I agree.
>
> Torsten
