[Mochi-devel] August updates

[Phil Carns]

Here are some news items that might be of interest:

- The origin/master build of Mercury includes OFI (libfabric) support 
now for anyone comfortable with building from git (the master branch 
tends to be stable in Mercury).  There are some notes about it on the 
Mercury documentation page at 
http://mercury-hpc.github.io/documentation/.  I've mostly been working 
with the GNI provider for Cray systems myself, but other OFI providers 
should work as well.

- The origin/master build of Argobots works on Power8 machines now. This 
was really mainly a configure issue; the context switching code was 
apparently already fine 
(https://github.com/pmodels/argobots/commit/8394f8ae6542f977457a6008d29ddd9a6036f246)

- The origin/master build of abt-io includes a pread() function now 
(https://xgitlab.cels.anl.gov/sds/abt-io/commit/35f16da88a1c579ed4726bfa77daa1884829fc0c). 
Generally these kinds of functions can just be added as needed using the 
same mechanisms as the existing functions.

- At ANL we are running some simple nightly regression tests for Margo 
performance on two systems, one with CCI/verbs and one with OFI/gni.  
They aren't very sophisticated yet, but it will help us track 
performance as the various components evolve.

- We are in the middle of a round of software engineering / tuning / 
cleanups on Margo that have not been merged to origin/master yet. This 
will fix some edge case bugs, make the code more maintainable, and 
hopefully make it a little less confusing to use.  More on that later.

thanks!
-Phil