A program compiled statically with MPICH will have issues with runtimes of a different version?

Question

I haven't read very much about MPI's implementation yet, but I was asked to setup a third party software statically linked against version 1.4.1pl of MPICH2 with an environment that runs the MPICH2 runtime with version 1.2.1.

Should I expect problems?

Answer 1

It will probably work, but it's not ideal. There are certainly bugs in 1.2.1 that have long been fixed. And since we don't usually test mixed version installations, bugs are more likely to occur in mixed version installations.

If you have odd configurations of the 1.2.1 environment (non-default process managers or PMI libraries), then the odds of a problem increase substantially.