Dan's Blog: For What it's worth.

The ClusterTools 8 (CT8) Early Access 1 (EA1) release is now available.

The CT8 EA1 software is a set of MPI libraries and tools for launching parallel MPI jobs on Solaris (SPARC and x86/x64). New in CT8 EA1 is MPI profiling support via VampirTrace and MPI PERUSE, Infiniband multi-rail communication, support for C++ applications built with libstlport4 or C++ standard, as well as other fixes and features contributed to Open MPI by the community.

CT8 EA1 is based on the upcoming Open MPI 1.3 release.

For what it's worth.

For a while now Open MPI has had heterogeneity support back into the source base. In the current version of Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 that is based on Open MPI, the heterogeneity testing did not fair so well base on that rev. of the source base. Big thanks to George and Brian for the work that was put into getting the code to work and I am sure many more along the way for additional support. Fast forward to the current source base that I have built and install on some nodes in the lab, Solaris/SPARC and Solaris/x64, and I kicked off the heterogeneity testing again. I have to say that I am happy to say that the limited testing of MPI jobs that I kicked off all passed. So I was seeing MPI communication on the mixed architecture cluster in the lab. From a ClusterTools perspective this is not officially qualified but looks to be something we might see in a future release. So what's next? Back to the lab to test out some other configurations like Solaris/SPARC, Solaris,x64 and Linux/x64.

So why is this anything to worry about? Think about places that have several "clusters" sitting around that they have had for a while... each time they built a new cluster it was a different OS or a different architecture... now they take an start using the entirety of their resources with a version of Open MPI that they can kick off large scale MPI jobs on. Why waste idle CPU cycles when you can put them to use.

For what it's worth.

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So the work is done some by my little coding hands and some by JS, a huge thanks to JS for his work and leadership on this. The Open MPI C++ library is now agnostic from being tied to either Cstd or stlport4. Now in the userland apps one is free to use whatever they would like. There was some sticky code in the previous implementation that used a data structure that did not allow for being agnostic. For those tracking on Sun ClusterTools this will show up in CT8.

For what it's worth

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 has hit the street...

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 is now available! Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 is an update release based on Open MPI 1.2.4. Included in Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 are Intel 32- and 64-bit support, improved parallel debugger support, PBS Pro validation, improved memory usage for communication, and other bug fixes by the Open MPI community since Open MPI 1.2 was first released.

For what it's worth.

For those that are interested, Terry just posted a little snip of some upcoming DTrace support that will be coming in ClusterTools.

For what it's worth.

There has been speculation, there have been rumors... and now it is true.  ROLFV has entered the blogging world.  Rolf is one of the team members that is working on Sun ClusterTools and has worked on several version of CT.

For what it's worth.
 

So I mentioned that a few of my colleagues were going to be at SC'06. Josh was able to catch them in act, booth duty and presentations that is. Head over and check out the "mpi engineers gone wild".

For what it's worth.

So in working on a large community project there are changes that sometime slide past the guy working on package prototype files... The previous four or five years while doing software release engineering I dealt with and used static (or basically) prototype files for building packages. I have to tell you that I am making the switch over to using pkgproto (1). We made the decision to simplify how we were breaking up the files into packages and move over to dynamic prototype files. In the end the same bits are delivered and it make my life a lot less messed up.

For that it's worth.

For I while now I have mentioned that I was on the team here at Sun working on Open MPI along with the rest of the OMPI community. Now we have our first Early Access release for the public. One can head over and check out the ea bits and give them a run.

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7 software comes with the following new features:
* First release based on the Open MPI source code
* uDAPL send/recv support
* N1GE plug-in
* DTRACE examples

For what it's worth.

I am happy to say that the couple small projects that I was working on for the Open MPI 1.2 release are done and now I can move onto bug fixing. The first one that I am taking on is extending the ability for the compiler wrappers to be able to build both 32 and 64 bit with a single instance. Fun stuff.

For what it's worth.