No, I did not mean it is necessary to compile Julia locally. One issue is that, at least on our system, there’s quite a set of environment combinations that a user can choose (Intel versus OpenMPI), HDF5 (tied to MPI version), srun versus mpiexec, etc. E.g. even OpenMPI comes in 3 flavors, compiled with GCC, Intel Compilers and NVIDIA HPC compilers. So depending on their needs (and sometimes restrictions in the software used forcing certain choices) they will load certain versions of these and I’m still not entirely sure Julia will pick up the correct shared libraries in all cases and it will work as expected, but I haven’t looked closely at that yet.
For example, looking at Configuration · MPI.jl it seems you do need to build MPI.jl with the correct module loaded, but this then means a user will need to make sure the same module is loaded when actually running a Julia program under that MPI. But again, I haven’t actually gone through these steps myself yet, partly because it takes quite a bit of time to figure out which libraries Julia uses from the system, which from jll’s it downloads itself, if these conflict with system libraries, if all combinations work, etc.
Edit: in short, correct configuration of the environment is part of the challenge 