[gmx-developers] building fully static mdrun

[Roland Schulz]

Hi,

I don't think it is useful besides on supercomputers. There the
advantage is that it works better with the command launching mechanism
(and that also partly only because the didn't make the extra effort to
get it to work at least for dynamic linked libraries with prior known
libraries (no dlopen)). And last time I checked on Cray and Bluegene
one automatically gets fully static binaries without any problems.

For distributing binaries fully static linked libraries are worse then
dynamic libraries (see e.g.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3430400/linux-static-linking-is-dead).
What would be useful for distributing binaries is if
GMX_PREFER_STATIC_LIBS would automatically gets libgomp linked
statically.

BTW: I configured Jenkins to build automatic binaries. The Linux
binaries work on all Linux distributions I have tested. Let me know if
they work for you too. My idea is to have binaries for all important
platforms on Jenkins so that when we have the 4.6beta, people can test
it without having to compile it. I think this will get us more
feedback. All binaries are with SSE2 acceleration. Currently you still
need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH if you extract it to somewhere else the
/usr/local/gromacs (fixed by I7ec8707a). The Windows binary still has
a weird path (fixed by Ie656d5fc).
http://jenkins.gromacs.org/job/Gromacs_Nightly_Linux32_4_6/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/Gromacs-4.6-dev-Linux.tar.gz
http://jenkins.gromacs.org/job/Gromacs_Nightly_Linux64_4_6/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/Gromacs-4.6-dev-Linux.tar.gz
http://jenkins.gromacs.org/job/Gromacs_Nightly_Win64_4_6/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/Gromacs-4.6-dev-win64.exe

Roland

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Szilárd Páll <szilard.pall at cbr.su.se> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In some cases it is required or advised to use a fully static linked mdrun,
> for instance on some Cray machines. There have been around some (slightly
> dirty) workarounds [1], but I think it is not desirable to have such
> solutions advised to users.
>
> Implementing this in CMake, beside thorough testing, requires only a couple
> of lines of code (especially if enabled for mdrun only). However, first it
> would be good to know whether this is useful or not.
>
> Let me know if you know of for which statically linked binaries are required
> or advised!
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Szilárd
> *
> [1]
> http://www.hector.ac.uk/support/documentation/software/gromacs/compiling_4-6-0_phase3.php



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