PGI-CDK 6.0 multi platform support

Dear forum,

We use the full PGI-CDK to fuel our clusters with compilers and the mpich library.
We have to support SuSE 8.1 Xeon, SLES8 and SuSE 9.0 Opteron systems.
PGI-CDK 5.2 supports all these platforms smoothly although it was installed
remotely for the SuSE 8.1 Xeon cluster and from one node of the SLES8 Opteron
cluster for all Opteron systems.

The same thing for PGI-CDK 6.0 has turned into a nightmare. None of the mpich
bindings works, partly due to very tight bindings of certain routines to a specific
glibc version, partly due to unresolved symbols in the mpich library for C that
are not located in any glibc but in the f2c library. Another problem is the remote
execution method which needs to be determined at installlation rather than at
runtime.

I had hoped that with version 5.2 the stand-alone behavior of the installation process
had come to an end, but the behavior of 6.0 is the worst ever. I would like to urge
the developers to avoid too specific bindings of symbols to glibc subversions and
mixing symbols from the f2c library into the pure C mpich library. Altogether a
substantially improved support for the installation of the PGI-CDK package on a
network drive which has to support more than one platform would be highly desirable.

For the time beeing we had to return to version 5.2.

Best regards,
Michael

Hi Michael,

The person who manages the CDK is on vacation this week but I’ll ask him to take a look when he gets back. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the CDK install process to be of much help here.

Thanks,
Mat

Hi Mat,

In the meantime we have installed a workaround. In ‘localrc’ we replaced all paths
with the names of symbolic links which are identical on all platforms. On each platform
this link points to another link which references the correct glibc version either locally
or again on the server. The same is done with the includes and the ssh libraries. This
allows an identical setup of all clients, where the lowest symbolic link is placed in the
/usr/lib directory of the client and will therefore always be searched for the library files
this link is pointing to (and which may again be located on the server). To support all
platforms mentioned above we had to provide the library versions 2.2.5, 2.3.2, and 2.3.3
on the server including the appropiate mpich rsh and ssh libraries.

It may be hard to do a setup like this automatically, because most of the work has to
be done on the client platform by defining the appropiate link. Nonetheless, some support
may be possible by allowing the installation of more than one library version for the PGI
compilers.

Best regards,
Michael

i have installed PGI CDK on 2 pcs on which running fedora core 3 .
They have only 1 processor for each.i have configured them to connect to each other with rsh,rlogin,rexec , etc . i want to know is how do i need to do to work these pcs parallel with that software support . please tell me some ideas for next steps .
Thanks a lot.