Libfabric

[ChrisDowning]

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Software Name

Libfabric

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Public URL

https://ofiwg.github.io/libfabric/

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Technical Overview

Libfabric is a framework providing interfaces to multiple underlying communication services (PSM, verbs, etc) to applications (eg OpenMPI).

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Latest stable version number

1.8.1

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Open-source license type

BSD or GPL v2

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Relationship to component?

• [ ] contributing developer
• [X] user
• [ ] other

If other, please describe:

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Build system

• [ ] autotools-based
• [ ] CMake
• [X] other

If other, please describe: Simple configure/make.

Does the current build system support staged path installations? For example: make install DESTIR=/tmp/foo (or equivalent)

• [X] yes
• [ ] no

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Does component run in user space or are administrative credentials required?

• [ ] user space
• [X] admin (Used purely for building applications, which are in turn user space)

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Does component require post-installation configuration.

• [ ] yes
• [X] no

If yes, please describe briefly: (Not for libfabric itself - but only useful as a precursor to other applications)

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If component is selected, are you willing and able to collaborate with OpenHPC maintainers during the integration process?

• [X] yes
• [ ] no

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Does the component include test collateral (e.g. regression/verification tests) in the publicly shipped source?

• [X] yes
• [ ] no

If yes, please briefly describe the intent and location of the tests. Provides a set of test configurations ("fabtests" in the repository)

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Does the component have additional software dependencies (beyond compilers/MPI) that are not part of standard Linux distributions?

• [ ] yes
• [X] no

If yes, please list the dependencies and associated licenses.

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Does the component include online or installable documentation?

• [X] yes
• [ ] no

If available online, please provide URL. https://ofiwg.github.io/libfabric/v1.8.1/man/

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[Optional]: Would you like to receive additional review feedback by email?

- [X] yes - [ ] no

[crbaird]

Hi @ChrisDowning - could you briefly state the benefit of packaging our own libfabric as opposed to using the distro provided one?

[ChrisDowning]

Hi @crbaird - that's a good question; basically when I originally concluded that requesting this would be a good idea, inclusion in a 1.3.x version might have been viable - in which case the OS version would be libfabric 1.7 (at the time, at least), which did not include the core component I'm interested in getting into OpenHPC - ie support for AWS EFA.

Now the OS version of libfabric in CentOS 8 is new enough, I guess that might not be an issue any more - however I think it would still be very beneficial if the OpenHPC MPI implementations were built with libfabric support enabled; using a more up-to-date libfabric than the OS one has its advantages, but is probably less important.

[ChrisDowning]

Closing this since libfabric is included in the 2.x releases.

For future reference, AWS EFA works out of the box on OpenSUSE 15.2 as the libefa library is pulled in as a dependency, but on CentOS 8 this library does not exist in the central package repositories and so libfabric must be recompiled after first installing the EFA driver bundle.