Guix and openmpi in a container environment

[Todor Kondić]

I am getting mpirun errors when trying to execute a simple

mpirun -np 1 program

(where program is e.g. 'ls') command in a container environment.

The error is usually:

All nodes which are allocated for this job are already filled.

which makes no sense, as I am trying this on my workstation (single socket, 
four cores -- your off-the-shelf i5 cpu) and no scheduling system enabled.


I set up the container with this command:

guix environment -C -N --ad-hoc -m default.scm

where default.scm:

(use-modules (guix packages))
(specifications->manifest
 `(;; Utilities
   "less"
   "bash"
   "make"
   "openssh"
   "guile"
   "nano"
   "glibc-locales"
   "gcc-toolchain@7.4.0"
   "gfortran-toolchain@7.4.0"
   "python"
   "openmpi"
   "fftw"
   "fftw-openmpi"
   ,@(map (lambda (x) (package-name x)) %base-packages)))



Simply installing openmpi (guix package -i openmpi) in my usual Guix profile 
just works out of the box. So, there has to be some quirk where the openmpi 
container installation is blind to some settings within the usual environment.