MPICH, release 1.2.0

Subject: New release of MPICH
From: Rusty Lusk
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 15:45:08 -0600



MPICH, release 1.2.0


This is to announce the release of version 1.2.0 of MPICH, a portable
implementation of the Message-Passing Interface standard. The new release can
be downloaded from http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich or (Unix versions only) by
anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/mpi/mpich.tar.gz .

What's New in 1.2?

Version 1.2.0 is primarily a bug fix and increased portability release,
especially for LINUX-based clusters. The Abstract Device Interface is
essentially unchanged. The structure and basic capabilities of MPICH are the
same as in version 1.1.2. However, there are a number of interesting new
features.

Full compliance with the 1.2 version of the MPI Standard, including
implementation of MPI_Cancel for sends.

Flow control for all of the channel-based devices. We have adopted the
flow-control style defined by the IMPI (Interoperable MPI) group.

A Windows NT version of MPICH is now available as open source. Above the
device level, this implementation shares source code with the Unix version
of MPICH. A new device has been implemented for NT using sockets and/or
shared memory for communication among MPI processes.

A new device (ch_p4mpd) for TCP networks, similar to the ch_p4 device but
based on daemons and thus supporting a number of new convenience features,
including fast startup. See the User's Guide for details.

A new, scalable log file format, SLOG, for use with the new MPE
logging tools.

A new version of the Jumpshot performance visualization tool (Jumpshot-3)
that can read large SLOG files. The combination of SLOG and Jumpshot-3
allows one to do performance analysis on large runs.

A Fortran 90 MPI module (See the User's Guide for details.)

Support for VPATH-style installations, useful when keeping source files
on shared file systems but building on local disks for speed.

Support for shared libraries (see the Installation Guide and User's Guide)

An installation process and choice of directory names that is closer to the
GNU-recommended approach

Release of version 1.0.2 of ROMIO, the portable implementation of the I/0
part of MPI-2. New in this version are shared file pointers, support for
the PVFS file system for Linux clusters, and other features described in
the README file in the romio directory.

Support for SMP-clusters in mpirun. This can be done in several ways,
described in the User's Guide.

Support for MPI-2's function MPI_INIT_THREAD (but only for
MPI_THREAD_SINGLE)

To try the Unix version of MPICH, download the compressed tar file and
uncompress and untar it. Then you can do:

   cd mpich-1.2.0
   configure >& configure.log
   make >& make.log
   cd examples/basic
   make cpi
   ../../bin/mpirun -np 4 cpi