3.4. General Run-Time Support Notes

• The Open MPI installation must be in your PATH on all nodes (and potentially LD_LIBRARY_PATH or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, if libmpi/libshmem is a shared library), unless using the --prefix or --enable-mpirun-prefix-by-default functionality (see below).

• Open MPI’s run-time behavior can be customized via Modular Component Architecture (MCA) parameters (see below for more information on how to get/set MCA parameter values). Some MCA parameters can be set in a way that renders Open MPI inoperable (see notes about MCA parameters later in this file). In particular, some parameters have required options that must be included.

  Error

  TODO Need a link in the above paragraph for how to set MCA params. This might be in FAQ content that has not yet been converted.

  • If specified, the btl parameter must include the self component, or Open MPI will not be able to deliver messages to the same rank as the sender. For example: mpirun --mca btl tcp,self ...

  • If specified, the btl_tcp_if_exclude parameter must include the loopback device (lo on many Linux platforms), or Open MPI will not be able to route MPI messages using the TCP BTL. For example: mpirun --mca btl_tcp_if_exclude lo,eth1 ...

• Running on nodes with different endian and/or different datatype sizes within a single parallel job is supported in this release. However, Open MPI does not resize data when datatypes differ in size (for example, sending a 4 byte MPI_DOUBLE and receiving an 8 byte MPI_DOUBLE will fail).