[ET Trac] [Einstein Toolkit] #1010: ExternalLibraries/MPI should check that MPI_DIR points to a valid directory

[Einstein Toolkit]

#1010: ExternalLibraries/MPI should check that MPI_DIR points to a valid directory
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  Reporter:  hinder                 |       Owner:     
      Type:  enhancement            |      Status:  new
  Priority:  minor                  |   Milestone:     
 Component:  EinsteinToolkit thorn  |     Version:     
Resolution:                         |    Keywords:     
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Comment (by eschnett):

 The message "Found MPI in ..." is the same as when thorn MPI actually
 looks for MPI; this is confusing, because people won't know which path
 printed the message.

 On some machine there is no specific MPI directory, e.g. on Crays. (This
 is similar to Intel's MKL library that is used by passing the "-mkl" flag
 to the compiler instead of specifying a particular directory.) Currently I
 specify "NO_BUILD" for MPI_DIR there. This or something equivalent should
 also be supported.

 I'm not sure how much checking we want to do on user configuration input.
 For example, we could also check whether the include and library
 directories exist, or whether there is a file mpi.h in the include path,
 or whether the specified libraries exist. Of course, these may also exist
 in standard system locations (so will be found automatically), etc., so
 things are complicated.

 On Mac OS X with MacPorts, OpenMPI is installed in a strange way, and we
 specify the include and library paths directly. Thus the actual content of
 MPI_DIR will be ignored, so checking that it exists doesn't add value.

 What we probably should do instead is to build (and run?) a small MPI
 program to see whether things work correctly. Since we already know how to
 build a library this shouldn't be difficult to do.

 Maybe we should also have a configuration option specifying which MPIRUN
 to use instead of leaving this to Simfactory.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.einsteintoolkit.org/ticket/1010#comment:1>
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