I want to update some GSL and HDF5 configuration options in SimFactory. I think this will help provide more recent version of these libraries. In the case of HDF5, this may lead to increased performance.
Currently, many machine option lists point to version of GSL, HDF5, and other libraries that I (or others) installed on these systems. Typically, this happens when we begin to use a machine for the first time, or when the current installation breaks. This also means that this library is often outdated, e.g. at version 1.8.1 for HDF5 instead of the current 1.8.5. Since HDF5 1.8.4 and 1.8.5 have Lustre performance improvements, this may lead to less efficient code, unless I (or someone else) installs a more recent version on these systems, or when we ask the system administrators to do so.
To simplify the situation, I suggest that we use the ExternalLibraries versions for these libraries. This would require people to use ExternaLibraries (which is already the case for the Einstein Toolkit). It would also slow down building from scratch, since these libraries have to be built.
I have just tested the corresponding changes to SimFactory on various systems. We don't need to make this change for all systems at the same time, and I only want to ask the question in principle here: are people comfortable with building libraries such as GSL and HDF5 together with Cactus, if this guarantees that more recent versions of these libraries are used?
(Of course, you are free to modify your option list locally to continue to use pre-installed libraries.)
-erik