[gmx-developers] 4.6 Binaries and Acceleration levels

[Nicholas Breen]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 11:05:53PM +0200, Szilárd Páll wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Christoph Junghans <junghans at votca.org> wrote:
> > Roland has a good point, but Debian and Fedora already compile Gromacs
> > for different mpi version.
> >
> > 4 acc. x 3 (serial,openmpi & mpich2) = 12 packages!
> >
> > @ Jussi: Would that still be possible?
> 
> I guess possible is one thing and probable is a totally different one...
> 
> Perhaps it would be good to ask the Ubuntu/Debian maintainer as well...

I would not want to create that much package complexity (the gromacs source
package already builds five binary packages!), especially if it would all be on
only one of the many architectures supported, and I cannot think of any other
package in the Debian archive that operates that way -- everything that I know
of with multiple CPU optimizations uses run-time detection, except for the
unavoidable cases with packaging the Linux kernel itself.  If it is
functionality that is contained purely within the shared libraries, then
glibc's hwcap support might be a workaround if the build system can permit
compiling one copy of the libraries for every supported variant.  Otherwise, if
it's all within mdrun itself, maybe just stick to run-time detection and
downgrade or eliminate the warnings it issues for "suboptimal" CPUs?


-- 
Nicholas Breen
nbreen at ofb.net
nbreen at debian.org