Are parallel versions of VisIt distributed?

[jrobcary]

I do not see a specific reference to a parallel version of VisIt at
https://visit-dav.github.io/visit-website/releases-as-tables/#series-34
but I see a discussion of how to build parallel at
https://visit-sphinx-github-user-manual.readthedocs.io/en/v3.3.3/building_visit/Advanced_Usage.html?highlight=running%20parallel

Does this mean that one must build VisIt to get a parallel version?

[markcmiller86]

@jrobcary sorry if it is not clear. If you hover over a download link, you get some more info about it. The Mac downloads include parallel version. I am not sure about the others. usually, parallel is handled by a build from source on a big server system.

[jrobcary]

Thanks, @markcmiller86. I see now that hovering on the Mac versions shows the version of MPICH. I do not see this hovering over the Fedora version. So just to be sure, I will have to build on Fedora or derivatives (Rocky, eg) to get a parallel version?

[biagas]

The 3.4.1 Fedora, Rocky, Debian, Ubuntu versions were all built with parallel enabled, in a docker container with MesaGL. MPICH version 3.3.1.
Windows version is parallel.

[markcmiller86]

@biagas I will update the balloon text that appears for those to include those details.

[markcmiller86]

@biagas what about Windows binaries...do those support parallel?

[jrobcary]

@markcmiller86 , because of your statement, "usually, parallel is handled by a build from source on a big server system", I proceeded to build visit on perlmutter. The first attempt failed in silo, with a missing Python.h, so ultimately I pared the build command down to a minimum,

spack install -j64 visit -mfem -adios2 -netcdf -silo ^python+shared ^mesa+opengl

This gets the build all the way to visit, but then that fails with

/pscratch/sd/c/cary/spack-stage/spack-stage-visit-3.4.1-qbpqvjjgqtoukedbz3jq5rxkhferi7lk/spack-src/src/engine/main/Engine.C:86:10: fatal error: avtConduitBlueprintDataAdaptor.h: No such file or directory
   86 | #include <avtConduitBlueprintDataAdaptor.h>
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Attached are the gzipped cmake and build files.

Suggestions?

spack-build-01-cmake-out.txt.gz
spack-build-02-build-out.txt.gz

[jrobcary]

Here is a zip file of a directory holding both files.

visitspack.zip

[jrobcary]

I am now trying a build with '-conduit', but perlmutter is down, so will not be able to check until late tonight.

Also noticed that I followed https://spack-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial_basics.html and got spack via

git clone --depth=2 --branch=releases/v0.23 https://github.com/spack/spack.git

which does appear to be the most recent tag at https://github.com/spack/spack/tags. But maybe there are fixes in develop?

[biagas]

Did you check qtbase-everywhere-src-6.4.2-build/config.summary for items related to X11 and xcb as I noted above? Most likely there are issues with X11 and or xcb packages being missing on the system.

[jrobcary]

Yes, and I updated my comment. How do I know what specific packages are missing? (I am compiling these in my own area.)

[biagas]

I am never sure which packages, take a look at VisIt's Docker files for the one closest to your system, look at packages with 'xcb' 'xkb' and 'x11' in the names, as well as name relating to the items you noted in the config.summary.

[jrobcary]

perlmutter is sles-15.4. I do not see a docker image for SUSE?

[biagas]

No docker for SUSE.

When I was figuring things out with the Docker files and Qt 6, I used Qt's X11 requirements page, along with package search for the system in question.
Here's a link for a search I just did for xcb on packagehub for suse.

[jrobcary]

Spack builds finally succeeded with

spack install -j16 visit -mfem -adios2 -netcdf -silo -conduit ^python+shared ^mesa+opengl

build_visit not yet working. Did not figure out dependencies.