[openib-general] Announcing the release of MVAPICH 0.9.7 with support for Gen2, SRQ with Flow Control, Fault Tolerance and aRO

[Dhabaleswar Panda]

Roland, 

>    Dhabaleswar> Starting with this 0.9.7 release, MVAPICH team is
>    Dhabaleswar> also pleased to announce the availability of the code
>    Dhabaleswar> base through anonymous SVN access.
>
>    ...
>
>    Dhabaleswar> A stripped down version of this release is also
>    Dhabaleswar> available at the OpenIB SVN.
>
>In the past you have assured us that you are not just using the OpenIB
>subversion tree as a distribution channel, and that all development
>was really happening in that tree.

The assurance still holds good. In fact, this new SVN is meant towards
this goal. Please see below for the justifications.
  
>Given that you are apparently using a different subversion tree for
>development, what is the justification for having MVAPICH checked into
>the OpenIB subversion tree?

So far, we internally had CVS (not SVN) for MVAPICH. For every
feedback and comments we were receiving from the OpenIB community, we
were doing changes to our local CVS as well as changing it manually to
the OpenIB SVN. We found this to be quite cumbersome.

Also for MVAPICH, there are support for multiple transport interfaces
(Gen2, VAPI, uDAPL and TCP/IP support) and a lot of other tools and
code (some of them in binary form) which come with the MPICH package
and are included in the MVAPICH package. When we initially put the
complete code in the OpenIB SVN, we got feedback to only keep a
compressed version there with minimal features. We have been following
this guideline. The purpose has been that the OpenIB community can
take advantage of everything (user-level stuff as well as the core
stuff) in an integrated manner for test and evaluation of the complete
stack. The community has been following these steps.

With 0.9.7 release, we also had to update the mvapich-gen2 stack to
include MPICH 1.2.7 version (earlier it was 1.2.6 based).

While the OpenIB community requires the MVAPICH-Gen2 support and the
compressed version, the broader MPI and InfiniBand community requires
support for all other interfaces and tools associated with MVAPICH.
Thus, the latest arrangement is to solve all of the above issues with
a complete SVN at the OSU site (with all transport interfaces and
associated tools) and carrying out automatic sync between the two SVNs
for the Gen2 interface.  In fact, you will notice that during the last
48 hours of the release, OpenIB SVN has been synced with the latest
changes at the OSU SVN so that the OpenIB community gets all the
changes for Gen2 interface immediately and it is available to the
community in an integrated manner for test and evaluation of the
complete stack.

Hope this helps. 

Thanks, 

DK


> - Roland