Can I disable Open MPIs use of plugins?
Yes. Open MPI uses plugins for much of its functionality. Specifically, Open MPI looks for and loads plugins as dynamically shared objects (DSOs) during the call to MPI_INIT. However, these plugins can be compiled and installed in several different ways: • As DSOs: In this mode (the default), each of Open MPI’s plugins are compiled as a separate DSO that is dynamically loaded at run time. • Advantage: this approach is highly flexible — it gives system developers and administrators fine-grained approach to install new plugins to an existing Open MPI installation, and also allows the removal of old plugins (i.e., forcibly disallowing the use of specific plugins) simply by removing the corresponding DSO(s). • Disadvantage: this approach causes additional filesystem traffic (mostly during MPI_INIT). If Open MPI is installed on a networked filesystem, this can cause noticable network traffic when a large parallel job starts, for example. • As part of a larger library: In this mode, Open MP
