[mpich-discuss] Announcing the availability of mpich2-1.4

[Pavan Balaji]

A new major release of MPICH2 (1.4) is available for download from 
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/mpich2/downloads/index.php?s=downloads

MPICH2-1.4 adds several new features including improved support for 
fault tolerance, support for the ARMCI API, and non-collective group 
creation functionality. This release also fixes many bugs in the Hydra 
process manager and various other parts of the MPICH2 code. All users 
using older releases of MPICH2 are encouraged to upgrade to this 
version. Please try it out and let us know if you encounter any problems 
at mpich-discuss at mcs.anl.gov.

Windows binaries will soon be available from the downloads page.

Regards,
The MPICH2 Team

===============================================================================
                                 Changes in 1.4
===============================================================================

  # OVERALL: Improvements to fault tolerance for collective
    operations. Thanks to Rui Wang @ ICT for reporting several of these
    issues.

  # OVERALL: Improvements to the universe size detection. Thanks to
    Yauheni Zelenko for reporting this issue.

  # OVERALL: Bug fixes for Fortran attributes on some systems. Thanks
    to Nicolai Stange for reporting this issue.

  # OVERALL: Added new ARMCI API implementation (experimental).

  # OVERALL: Added new MPIX_Group_comm_create function to allow
    non-collective creation of sub-communicators.

  # FORTRAN: Bug fixes in the MPI_DIST_GRAPH_ Fortran bindings.

  # PM/PMI: Support for a manual "none" launcher in Hydra to allow for
    higher-level tools to be built on top of Hydra. Thanks to Justin
    Wozniak for reporting this issue, for providing several patches for
    the fix, and testing it.

  # PM/PMI: Bug fixes in Hydra to handle non-uniform layouts of hosts
    better. Thanks to the MVAPICH group at OSU for reporting this issue
    and testing it.

  # PM/PMI: Bug fixes in Hydra to handle cases where only a subset of
    the available launchers or resource managers are compiled
    in. Thanks to Satish Balay @ Argonne for reporting this issue.

  # PM/PMI: Support for a different username to be provided for each
    host; this only works for launchers that support this (such as
    SSH).

  # PM/PMI: Bug fixes for using Hydra on AIX machines. Thanks to
    Kitrick Sheets @ NCSA for reporting this issue and providing the
    first draft of the patch.

  # PM/PMI: Bug fixes in memory allocation/management for environment
    variables that was showing up on older platforms. Thanks to Steven
    Sutphen for reporting the issue and providing detailed analysis to
    track down the bug.

  # PM/PMI: Added support for providing a configuration file to pick
    the default options for Hydra. Thanks to Saurabh T. for reporting
    the issues with the current implementation and working with us to
    improve this option.

  # PM/PMI: Improvements to the error code returned by Hydra.

  # PM/PMI: Bug fixes for handling "=" in environment variable values in
    hydra.

  # PM/PMI: Upgrade the hwloc version to 1.1.2.

  # COLLECTIVES: Performance and memory usage improvements for MPI_Bcast
    in certain cases.

  # VALGRIND: Fix incorrect Valgrind client request usage when MPICH2 is
    built for memory debugging.

  # BUILD SYSTEM: "--enable-fast" and "--disable-error-checking" are once
    again valid simultaneous options to configure.

  # TEST SUITE: Several new tests for MPI RMA operations.

  # Several other minor bug fixes, memory leak fixes, and code cleanup.
    A full list of changes is available using:

      svn log -r7838:HEAD 
https://svn.mcs.anl.gov/repos/mpi/mpich2/tags/release/mpich2-1.4rc2

      ... or at the following link:

	https://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/mpich2/log/mpich2/tags/release/mpich2-1.4rc2?action=follow_copy&rev=HEAD&stop_rev=7838&mode=follow_copy

-- 
Pavan Balaji
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~balaji