Charm++ parallel programming system

["White, Samuel T" <white67 AT illinois.edu>]

Hello everyone,

At the conclusion of our 14th annual Charm++ Workshop, I am pleased to announce the release of Charm++ 6.7.1, the latest stable release of Charm++. The release branch is charm-6.7.1 and the git tag is v6.7.1. This version has passed all of our usual testing, and has been confirmed to be stable by many applications developers.

This release is primarily a bug fix release, with the exception of AMPI. Here is a brief list of changes included in 6.7.1:

Charm++ Bug Fixes:
- Startup and exit sequences are more robust
- Error/warning messages are generally more informative
- CkMulticast's set and concat reducers work correctly

AMPI Features:
- AMPI's extensions have been renamed to use the prefix 'AMPI_'
- AMPI_Migrate(MPI_Info) is now used for both dynamic load balancing and fault tolerance
- AMPI now supports MPI-2.2, as well as MPI-3.1's nonblocking and neighborhood collectives

Portability and Platforms:
- Cray regularpages build has been fixed
- Clang compiler target for BlueGene/Q systems added
- Communication thread tracing for SMP mode
- AMPI compiler wrappers are easier to use with autoconf and cmake

The complete list of issues that have been merged/resolved in 6.7.1 can be found here, and the associated commits can be seen here. Feel free to open redmine issues for bugs you encounter and features that you would like to see in Charm++.

Finally, if you haven't yet, check out the slides from the Charm++ Workshop here. We had two great keynote presentations from Barbara Chapman and Thomas Sterling, as well as talks from many group members and users. The video for each presentation will be posted shortly.

Thanks, on behalf of PPL,
Sam White

white67 AT illinois.edu