[gmx-developers] building fully static mdrun

[Roland Schulz]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 2:11 PM, Szilárd Páll <szilard.pall at cbr.su.se> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 7:13 PM, Roland Schulz <roland at utk.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I don't think it is useful besides on supercomputers. There the
>
>
> That's exactly what I would intend it it to be used for.
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> I know of at least 1-2 Crays where it was slightly tedious to get
> dynamically linked binaries to work. The compiler wrappers were assuming
> that, by applying their internal mumbo-jumbo, static linking will just work,
> while CMake intended to link dynamically.
Yes it is tedious to get dynamic liberies to work. But on the Crays I
have access to, the compiler wrappers give me a fully static version
of Gromacs without any problems. The compiler wrappers automatically
add the "-static". Of course this fails if cmake only finds a dynamic
library and thus picks that. I usually only have that with  libxml2
but than all I need to do is use -DGMX_XML=no. Is that what you want
to fix? That it doesn't try to use dynamic libraries if it can't find
a static version? If so I'm not against it, but I also don't think it
is very important because "-DGMX_XML=no" is so easy.
>
>>
>> What would be useful for distributing binaries is if
>> GMX_PREFER_STATIC_LIBS would automatically gets libgomp linked
>> statically.
>
>
> No idea, -static will work if all libraries (both external and system) are
> available in static form. Otherwise, -fopenmp seems to always pull in
> libgomp.so.
>
> Are the rest of the system lib dependencies not an issue?
The problem with libgomp is that it isn't a standard system library.
Standard system libraries are part of the base system and thus always
installed. But libgomp is part of gcc and not guaranteed to be
available. The same is true for libgcc but it can be easily fixed with
-static-libgcc. But sadly (see
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=31400) it doesn't
automatically also make libgomp static. But we could work around it
relatively easily by not setting -fopenmp for the linker but instead
"-Wl,-static -lgomp -lrt -Wl,-Bdynamic -lpthread" if
GMX_PREFER_STATIC_LIBS is set (of course this is gcc specific). I
could put this in Jenkins but I think it is better to keep Jenkins
simple and have it in cmake.

Roland

>
> --
> Sz.
>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ORNL/UT Center for Molecular Biophysics cmb.ornl.gov
>> 865-241-1537, ORNL PO BOX 2008 MS6309
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-- 
ORNL/UT Center for Molecular Biophysics cmb.ornl.gov
865-241-1537, ORNL PO BOX 2008 MS6309