Add support for Axom to use a parallel mfem

kennyweiss commented 3 years ago

As we begin to use MFEM in more of Axom, e.g. in the MFEMSidreDataCollection class, we need to add support for generating a parallel MFEM in our uberenv/spack and for testing Axom against a parallel version of MFEM.

In particular, a serial version of Axom should support a serial MFEM, while a parallel version of Axom should support both serial and parallel configurations of MFEM.

In #496, I attempted to generate a parallel version of mfem in our spack configs, but ran into some problems:

In our spec without a Fortran compiler, we ran into issues building Hypre -- a necessary dependency of parallel MFEM
On LLNL's blueos cluster, I encountered linking issues with the system blas and lapack

rhornung67 commented 3 years ago

@kennyweiss can this issue be closed?

kennyweiss commented 3 years ago

I was able to resolve this for one configuration in #649

https://github.com/LLNL/axom/blob/d7e784d7092c1508b6a6559f3bb07f80e5a06f19/scripts/spack/configs/blueos_3_ppc64le_ib_p9/packages.yaml#L48-L54

Changing the configs is tracked by #680

LLNL / axom

Add support for Axom to use a parallel mfem #547