# 9.7. Building fully-static MPI applications

## 9.7.1. Is fully-static really what you need?

No one ends up in this documentation section by accident.

If you are reading this text, it is likely because you are looking to solve a problem, and fully-static MPI applications sound like the right answer. There are two common problems that people think that fully-static MPI applications will solve:

1. MPI applications fail to launch because dependent shared libraries are not found at run-time.

2. Filesystem performance when launching at scale is terrible.

If either of these are your problems, the Open MPI community strongly encourages you to use other mechanisms to fix the problem: fully-static MPI applications are possible, but are sub-optimal for other reasons.

The following sections discuss the above problems.

### 9.7.1.1. Finding dependent shared libraries at run-time

If you are running in to problems finding shared libraries at run time — particularly on nodes that are remote from where you have invoked `mpirun` — your best bet is to set `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` (or equivalent mechanism) properly on all nodes (including remote nodes).

This is an involved topic, but even so, it is generally simpler to solve this problem than creating and maintaining static builds. See the section on Running MPI applications for more details.

### 9.7.1.2. Improving filesystem performance at scale

Prior to v5.0.0, Open MPI compiled a large number of plugins as individual dynamic shared objects (DSOs) — i.e., individual files in the filesystem. Many of these DSOs would be opened by each MPI process at run time.

This could cause filesystem congestion, particularly when Open MPI is installed on a network filesystem and a large job is launched: many nodes will simultaneously communicate with the file server(s), and potentially need to transfer a large number of small(ish) files.

Starting with v5.0.0, by default, Open MPI’s plugins are no longer built as DSOs. As such, Open MPI typically only opens a small number of shared libraries at launch time. Even if Open MPI is installed on a network filesystem, these libraries are likely to be cached on nodes over time, and therefore generate a fairly small amount network filesystem traffic when MPI jobs are launched.

In short: Open MPI v5.0.4’s impact on network filesystems is greatly diminished compared to prior versions. Compiling fully-static applications to eliminate the open-every-DSO-file-at-launch-time behavior is no longer necessary.

### 9.7.1.3. Other reasons fully-static applications are bad

Here are a few other reasons that fully-static MPI applications are sub-optimal:

1. When applications link all of their dependencies statically, the operating system cannot share code between multiple copies of the process.

   For example, if you launch N copies of your fully-statically-linked MPI application on a node, it will consume (N * size_of_the_application) bytes of RAM. Alternately, launching N copies of a dynamically-linked MPI application — where each of the copies have the same dependent libraries — will only load each shared dependent library into RAM once.

   In other words: using dynamic linking saves memory.

2. Fully-static applications are not linked to the dynamic linking library, e.g. `libdl` on Linux, which provides `dlopen(3)`, `dlsym(3)`, etc. This will break Open MPI functionalities that depend on such interfaces.

   Warning

   Open MPI’s memory management functionality, which provides important performance optimizations on OS-bypass networks such as InfiniBand, requires the `dlsym(3)` interface, and therefore does not work with fully-static applications.

Are you convinced yet? Please try to avoid building fully-static MPI applications if at all possible.

## 9.7.2. Building fully-static MPI applications

Caution

If, after reading all of the above, you are still of the mind that you want to build fully-static MPI applications, be aware that fully static linking is not for the meek, and it is not recommended. But it is possible, with some caveats.

1. You must have static libraries available for everything to which your program links. This includes Open MPI; you must have used the `--enable-static` option to Open MPI’s `configure` or otherwise have available the static versions of the Open MPI libraries.

   Note

   Some Linux distributions may not have static versions of popular Linux libraries by default (e.g., libnuma), or require additional RPMs to be installed to get the equivalent static libraries.

2. Open MPI must have been built without a memory manager. This means that Open MPI must have been configured with the `--without-memory-manager` flag. This is irrelevant on some platforms for which Open MPI does not have a memory manager, but on some platforms it is necessary (Linux when using many OS-bypass networks). It is harmless to use this flag on platforms where Open MPI does not have a memory manager.

   Important

   Not including memory manager support can lead to lower performance when Open MPI is used with OS-bypass networks.

This is how to configure Open MPI to build fully-static libraries on Linux:

    shell$ ./configure --without-memory-manager --disable-dlopen \
        --enable-static --disable-shared ...

The `--disable-shared` flag is optional; it will prevent Open MPI from also building shared libraries.

Alternatively, you could build Open MPI with as many static libraries as possible, but still preserve `dlopen` functionality by omitting the `--disable-dlopen` flag:

    shell$ ./configure --without-memory-manager \
        --enable-static --disable-shared ...

This gives you a mostly static build of Open MPI, but has the advantage of preserving at least some dynamic libraries.

### 9.7.2.1. Including whole archives

Some systems may have additional constraints about their support libraries that require additional steps to produce working fully-static MPI applications. For example, any library that has its own run-time plugin system (i.e., that opens dynamically shared objects (“DSOs”) at run time) will have additional complications in producing fully-static builds.

In such cases, you generally want to run `mpicc ... --showme` to see the compiler / linker commands that Open MPI’s wrapper commands will use, and then augment those commands with linker arguments for the static versions of the DSO plugins that you will need at run time.

For example, if you have `libfoo.a` that dynamically loads `plugin.so` at run time, you’ll need to have a `plugin.a` and — assuming the GNU linker — add arguments similar to the following:

- `-static`: Tell the linker to generate a static executable.

- `-Wl,--whole-archive -lfoo /path/to/plugin.a -Wl,--no-whole-archive`: Tell the linker to include the entire `foo` library and the entire `plugin.a` archive in the executable.

You can either add these arguments on the command line manually, or you can modify the default behavior of the wrapper compilers to hide this complexity from end users (but be aware that if you modify the wrapper compilers’ default behavior, all users will be creating static applications!).