Charm++ parallel programming system

[Nikhil Jain <nikhil AT illinois.edu>]

Hello Everyone, 

I am pleased to announce the release of Charm++ 6.7.0, the latest stable release of Charm++. The git tag for this release is v6.7.0 and the release branch is charm-6.7.0. This version has passed all of the usual testing in the nightly builds, and has been confirmed to be stable by many application developers. Here is a list of significant changes that this release contains over version 6.6.1.

*Features*:

1) New API for efficient formula-based distributed spare array creation.

2) Missing MPI-2.0 API additions to AMPI.

3) Out-of-tree build is now supported.

4) New target: multicore-linux-arm7

5) PXSHM auto detects the node size.

6) Added support for ++mpiexec with poe.

7) Add new API related to migration in AMPI.

8) CkLoop is now built by default.

9) Scalable startup is now the default behavior when launching a job using chamrun.

*Bug fixes*: Over 120 bug fixes, spanning areas across the entire system. Here is a list of the major fixes:

1) Bug fix to handle CUDA threads correctly at exit.

2) Bug fix in the recovery code on a node failure.

3) Bug fixes in AMPI functions - MPI_Comm_create, MPI_Testall.

4) Disable ASLR on Darwin builds to fix multi-node executions.

5) Add flags to enable compilation of Charm++ on newer Cray compilers with C++11 support.

*Deprecations and deletions*: 

1) CommLib has been deleted.

2) +nodesize option for PXSHM is deprecated

3) CmiBool has been dropped in favor of C++'s bool.

4) CBase_Foo::pup need not be called from Foo::pup.

The complete list of issues that have been merged/resolved in 6.7.0 can be found here. The associated git commits can be viewed here. We look forward to feedback and comments on this release from our users. Feel free to add redmine issues for bugs you notice and features that you would like to see in Charm++.

Happy object-oriented parallel programming!

Thanks

On behalf of PPL,

Nikhil

Nikhil Jain, nikhil.jain AT acm.org, http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/people/nikhil
Doctoral Candidate @ CS, UIUC