Mellanox HPCX

Mellanox is the manufacturer of our Infiniband hardware. They provide an optimized set of libraries for running parallel programs.

With the recent update to Ubuntu 18.04 some programs failed with the system default openMPI library. As alternative we have installed a system wide HPCX software.

This lives in

  /home/software/hpcx/current  .

This points to the latest installed version.

To use this library you have to extend your .bashrc. Include the following lines:

 export HPCX_HOME=/home/software/hpcx/current
 source $HPCX_HOME/hpcx-init.sh

This doesn't change your actual environment yet. To finally activate the setup call:

 hpcx_load

Then all MPI tools are loaded from HPCX. This is required for building and running. You may call this is in your jobs-scripts.

There are other MPI flavours in HPCX. Read the documentation within there:

 /home/software/hpcx/current/README.txt