How to build boost with mpi support on homebrew?

Question

According to this post (https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/pull/2953), the flag "--with-mpi" should enable boost_mpi build support for the related homebrew formula, so I am trying to install boost via homebrew like this:

brew install boost --with-mpi

However, the actual boost mpi library is not being build and can not be found. There is currently some work being done around this, according to: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/pull/15689

In summary, I can currently build boost, but it seems the "--with-mpi" flag is being ignored. Could someone please check, if I should be able to build boost (with mpi support) on Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)?

The (verbose) output generates these lines:

MPI auto-detection failed: unknown wrapper compiler mpic++
Please report this error to the Boost mailing list: http://www.boost.org
You will need to manually configure MPI support.

warning: skipping optional Message Passing Interface (MPI) library.
note: to enable MPI support, add "using mpi ;" to user-config.jam.
note: to suppress this message, pass "--without-mpi" to bjam.
note: otherwise, you can safely ignore this message.

Not sure how exactly I can fix this and get the mpi stuff to be build - any ideas?

Answer 1

Just in case this helps anyone else along the line, here's how I fixed this. The main error is MPI auto-detection failed: unknown wrapper compiler mpic++, any typing mpic++ at the command line verified that it was not working properly for me. I used brew to install open-mpi, but the same error was showing in the verbose output for installing boost. A run of brew doctor showed that openmpi was not linked properly, so I fixed those errors and reran brew -v install boost --with-mpi --without-single and it finally built and installed all of the libraries without a problem

Answer 2

To anyone that comes across this, the package migrated to boost-python and boost-mpi separate from boost. Use brew install boost-mpi