hardware requirments for SLiM5.2

[Solomon Sloat]

Hi Ben,

I have been running sims on a distributed cluster and have noticed crashes on jobs that were specifically sent to clusters with older hardware. Of those, most exit with some kind of opaque SIGILL error.  I didn't notice this with v5.0 (haven't tried v5.1). My hypothesis is that the updated vector operations are not compatible with x86_64-v2 hardware. Those 2012 cpus are pretty old now, but there are still plenty of HPCs that still have them in use! I was just wondering if this is a known thing on your end or if there is something I could fix on my end. Either way I was hoping I could get some clarity on hardware requirements from you if possible.

Thanks! 

Sol 

[Ben Haller]

Hi Sol!  This is a known problem that Andy Kern and I weren't expecting to come up in practice – we didn't think anybody would still be running on 14-year-old hardware :->.  (I don't know how many HPCs are still using such old CPUs, but you're the first person to report this; I guess we'll see!  I'm a bit surprised that such old hardware can still run an OS version recent enough to be compatible with SLiM in other respects!)  I've just opened an issue on it:

https://github.com/MesserLab/SLiM/issues/628

As mentioned in that issue, you can turn off the SIMD optimizations by building SLiM yourself from sources (see chapter 2 of the SLiM manual) and passing `-D USE_SIMD=OFF` to `cmake`.  That should solve the problem for you, for now.  We'll see whether it is straightforward to detect the old hardware and turn SIMD off automatically, for future versions of SLiM.  Sorry about that, and thanks for the report!

Cheers,
-B.

Benjamin C. Haller
Messer Lab
Cornell University

[Andrew Kern]

Hi Sol--

Can you tell us more about the hardware you are trying to run this on? `cat /proc/cpuinfo`  should give us what I'm looking for.

thanks,

Andy