[petsc-dev] Seeking OLCF users complaining about poor build times

[Satish Balay]

I think we made some progress in improving build times.

We have some of the externalpackages building using parallel make - so
that part is faster now. [ Some of this stuff might be in master - but
not 3.5]

Some packages are still built sequentially [for eg:
fblaslapack,scalapack,superlu etc]. Fixing them can reduce build time
significantly. [esp if the machine has many cores]

The sequential configure [of all packages] is still the
bottleneck. All compiles [by PETSc configure] are done in TMPDIR to
avoid NFS I/O.

Reducing the number of tests done in configure won't be easy. I have a
minor fix that avoids unnecessary compiles wrt externalpackages in
branch 'balay/update-configure-lib-search'

BTW: I don't have access to oakridge machines..

Satish

On Wed, 25 Feb 2015, Barry Smith wrote:

> 
>   Shockingly this is not bad (though more than it should be), we've seen times like an hour on the NERSC and ANL systems. 
> 
>   If you have time :-) could you run with metis, permetis, superlu_dist and hypre --with-debugging=0 and get the times separately for configure and make? 
> 
>   Thanks
> 
>    Barry
> 
> > On Feb 25, 2015, at 9:05 PM, Nathan Collier <nathaniel.collier at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I have built on Titan, I can time my configure for more accurate answers but I would say it was on the order of 10-15 minutes. That is with a Metis/parmetis build. Is this the type of experience you are looking for? More details?
> > 
> > Nate
> > 
> > On Wednesday, February 25, 2015, Victor Eijkhout <eijkhout at tacc.utexas.edu> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Feb 25, 2015, at 1:27 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> > >
> > > If you have accounts there and can reproduce slow configure/make times
> > 
> > Just let me know if you want a comparison to TACC machines.
> > 
> > Starting with Ranger, we gave our build node its own file system because I regularly crashed lustre with the petsc build. No fault of Petsc.
> > 
> > And I have no complaints about the configure/make speed, on either our build node or the regular user file system.
> > 
> > Victor.
> > 
> 
>