Copyright (c) 2004-2005 The Trustees of Indiana University and Indiana University Research and Technology Corporation. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2004-2005 The University of Tennessee and The University of Tennessee Research Foundation. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2004-2005 High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, University of Stuttgart. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2004-2005 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2008-2010 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. $COPYRIGHT$ Additional copyrights may follow $HEADER$ Overview ======== This file is here for those who are building/exploring OMPI in its source code form, most likely through a developer's tree (i.e., a Subversion or Mercurial checkout). Debugging vs. Optimized Builds ============================== If you are building Open MPI from a Subversion checkout, the default build includes a lot of debugging features. This happens automatically when when configure detects the hidden ".svn" Subversion meta directory (that is present in all Subversion checkouts) in your source tree, and therefore activates a number of developer-only debugging features in the Open MPI code base. The same debugging features are activated if you build in a Mercurial clone (with the hidden ".hg" meta directory). By definition, debugging builds will perform [much] slower than optimized builds of Open MPI. You should *NOT* conduct timing tests or try to run production performance numbers with debugging builds. If you wish to build an optimized version of Open MPI from a developer's checkout, you have three main options: 1. Use the "--with-platform=optimized" switch to configure. This is the preferred (and probably easiest) method. For example: shell$ svn co http://svn.open-mpi.org/svn/ompi/trunk ompi shell$ cd ompi shell$ ./autogen.pl shell$ mkdir build shell$ cd build shell$ ./configure --with-platform=optimized ... [...lots of output...] shell$ make all install 2. Use a VPATH build. Simply build Open MPI from a different directory than the source tree -- one where the .svn / .hg subdirectory is not present. For example: shell$ svn co http://svn.open-mpi.org/svn/ompi/trunk ompi shell$ cd ompi shell$ ./autogen.pl shell$ mkdir build shell$ cd build shell$ ../configure ... [...lots of output...] shell$ make all install 3. Manually specify configure options to disable all the debugging options (note that this is exactly what "--with-platform=optimized" does behind the scenes). You'll need to carefully examine the output of "./configure --help" to see which options to disable. They are all listed, but some are less obvious than others (they are not listed here because it is a changing set of flags; by Murphy's Law, listing them here will pretty much guarantee that this file will get out of date): shell$ ./configure --disable-debug ... [...lots of output...] shell$ make all install Use of GNU m4, Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool ============================================== This procedure is *ONLY* necessary if you are building from a developer's tree. If you have an Open MPI distribution tarball, this procedure is unnecessary -- you can (and should) skip reading this section. If you are building Open MPI from a developer's tree, you must first install fairly recent versions of the GNU tools m4, Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool. The specific versions required depend on if you are using the trunk or a release branch (and which release branch you are using). The specific versions can be found at: http://www.open-mpi.org/svn/building.php You can check what versions of the autotools you have installed with the following: shell$ m4 --version shell$ autoconf --version shell$ automake --version shell$ libtoolize --version To strengthen the above point: the core Open MPI developers typically use very, very recent versions of the GNU tools. There are known bugs in older versions of the GNU tools that Open MPI no longer compensates for (it seemed senseless to indefinitely support patches for ancient versions of Autoconf, for example). You *WILL* have problems if you do not use recent versions of the GNU tools. If you need newer versions, you are *strongly* encouraged to heed the following advice: NOTE: On MacOS/X, the default "libtool" program is different than the GNU libtool. You must download and install the GNU version (via Fink or any other mechanism). 1. Unless your OS distribution has easy-to-use binary installations, the sources can be can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/ ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/ ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/ ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/ 2. Build and install the tools in the following order: 2a. m4 2b. Autoconf 2c. Automake 2d. Libtool 3. You MUST install the last three tools (Autoconf, Automake, Libtool) into the same prefix directory. These three tools are somewhat inter-related, and if they're going to be used together, they MUST share a common installation prefix. You can install m4 anywhere, as long as it can be found in the path. It may be convenient to install it instal the same prefix as the other three. 3a. It is *strongly* encouraged that you do not install your new versions over the OS-installed versions. This could cause other things on your system to break. Instead, install into $HOME/local, or /usr/local, or wherever else you tend to install "local" kinds of software. 3b. In doing so, be sure to prefix your $path with the directory where they are installed. For example, if you install into $HOME/local, you may want to edit your shell startup file (.bashrc, .cshrc, .tcshrc, etc.) to have something like: # For bash/sh: export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH # For csh/tcsh: set path = ($HOME/local/bin $path) 3c. Ensure to set your $path *BEFORE* you configure/build/install the four packages. 4. All four packages require two simple commands to build and install (where PREFIX is the prefix discussed in 3, above). shell$ cd m4-1.4.13 shell$ ./configure --prefix=PREFIX shell$ make; make install --> If you are using the csh or tcsh shells, be sure to run the "rehash" command after you install each package. shell$ cd ../autoconf-2.68 shell$ ./configure --prefix=PREFIX shell$ make; make install --> If you are using the csh or tcsh shells, be sure to run the "rehash" command after you install each package. shell$ cd ../automake-1.11.1 shell$ ./configure --prefix=PREFIX shell$ make; make install --> If you are using the csh or tcsh shells, be sure to run the "rehash" command after you install each package. shell$ cd ../libtool-2.2.8 shell$ ./configure --prefix=PREFIX shell$ make; make install --> If you are using the csh or tcsh shells, be sure to run the "rehash" command after you install each package. m4, Autoconf and Automake build and install very quickly; Libtool will take a minute or two. 5. You can now run OMPI's top-level "autogen.pl" script. This script will invoke the GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool commands in the proper order and setup to run OMPI's top-level "configure" script. Running autogen.pl may take several minutes, depending on your system. It's not very exciting to watch. :-) If you have a multi-processor system, enabling the multi-threaded behavior in Automake 1.11 (or newer) can result in autogen.pl running faster. Do this by setting the AUTOMAKE_JOBS environment variable to the number of processors (threads) that you want it to use. For example (you can again put this in your shell startup files): # For bash/sh: export AUTOMAKE_JOBS=4 # For csh/tcsh: set AUTOMAKE_JOBS 4 5a. You generally need to run autogen.pl whenever the top-level file "configure.ac" changes, or any files in the config/ directory change (the config/ directory is where a lot of "include" files for OMPI's configure script live). 5b. You do *NOT* need to re-run autogen.pl if you modify a Makefile.am. Use of Flex =========== Flex is used during the compilation of a developer's checkout (it is not used in distribution tarballs). Other flavors of lex are *not* supported: given the choice of making parsing code portable between all flavors of lex and doing more interesting work on Open MPI, we greatly prefer the latter. Several POSIXly-oriented developers use the stable flex version v2.5.4a from July of 1997. Others have upgraded to more recent versions; these also seem to work fine. Note that no testing has been performed to see what the minimum version of Flex is required by Open MPI. We suggest that you use v2.5.4a at the earliest. *** NOTE: Windows builds of Open MPI require Flex version 2.5.35. Specifically, we know that v2.5.35 works and 2.5.4a does not. We have not tested to figure out exactly what the minimum required flex version is on Windows; we suggest that you use 2.5.35 at the earliest. It is for this reason that the contrib/dist/make_dist_tarball script checks for a Windows-friendly version of flex before continuing. Note that the flex-generated code generates some compiler warnings on some platforms, but the warnings do not seem to be consistent or uniform on all platforms, compilers, and flex versions. As such, we have done little to try to remove those warnings. If you do not have Flex installed, it can be downloaded from the following URL: http://flex.sourceforge.net/