RHEA-2009:1023 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

Updated openmpi packages that fix a bug and add enhancements are now
available.

Description

Open MPI, MVAPICH, and MVAPICH2 are all competing implementations of the
Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. MVAPICH implements version 1 of
the MPI standard, while Open MPI and MVAPICH2 both implement the later,
version 2 of the MPI standard.

All of these software stacks are used for cluster communications in
high-performance computing clusters. While MVAPICH and MVAPICH2 both strive
for maximum performance and are generally considered the faster
implementations, Open MPI has the advantage of having more portable code
and being supported on more architectures then either MVAPICH implementation.

These updated packages include a simple command line utility, mpi-selector,
which can be used to select the MPI stack that the user would like to use
when more than one stack is installed on the systems.

Important: several bugs in the install and uninstall scripts of previous
versions of the openmpi package (for versions 1.1.1, 1.2.3, and 1.2.5) may
have prevented upgrades from completing properly. The install and uninstall
scripts of this version of openmpi now ensure that upgrades complete
without error, and that there are no residual errors or system
inconsistencies left behind when the upgrade is complete. These packages
include, as enhancements:

• the MVAPICH MPI implementation.
• the MVAPICH2 MPI implementation.
• a new package, mpitests, that provides utilities for testing cluster

communications over each MPI implementation.

In addition, the Open MPI stack has been upgraded from upstream version
1.2.5 to version 1.2.8, which includes a number of bug fixes and
enhancements not listed here. For the full list of bug fixes and
enhancements included in the 1.2.6 release, see:

http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/announce/2008/04/0019.php

For the full list of bug fixes and enhancements included in the 1.2.7
release, see:

http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/announce/2008/08/0022.php

For the full list of bug fixes and enhancements included in the 1.2.8
release, see:

http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/announce/

MPI users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 4 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 459516 - openmpi 1.2.3 rebase breaks ABI
• BZ - 461110 - openmpi-libs update error
• BZ - 465921 - openmpi is missing BR gcc4-gfortran
• BZ - 465922 - openmpi11 is missing BR sysfsutils-devel
• BZ - 481599 - LTC:4.8:200770:Include Open Fabric Enterprise Distribution
• BZ - 484908 - Unresolvable chain of dependencies for openmpi-libs 1.2.8-3.el4

CVEs

(none)

References

• http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/announce/2008/04/0019.php
• http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/announce/2008/08/0022.php
• http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/announce/