GASNet v 1.6 released!

• Previous message: jcduell_at_lbl_dot_gov: "Berkeley UPC beta release 2"

We are pleased to announce the release of GASNet v 1.6, which is now available 
for public download from the new GASNet project web site:

                          http://gasnet.cs.berkeley.edu

This release coincides with the release of Berkeley UPC 2.2 and Titanium 
v3.86, both of which include a copy of GASNet 1.6. The high-level summary of 
changes since the last release is included below.

The GASNet developers would like to acknowledge the valuable feedback and 
contributions from the compiler teams using GASNet as a communication 
substrate - Berkeley UPC, GCC/UPC, Titanium and Rice Co-Array Fortran - as 
well as the end-users of those systems and direct users of GASNet.

Congratulations to all!

Dan Bonachea

* New conduits added:
   - shmem-conduit: High-performance conduit using the shmem communication
     interface on Cray X1 and SGI Altix. May support targetting other shmem
     implementations in the future.

* New platform support:
     - Add cross-compilation support, specifically including the Cray X-1
     - Experimental support for the Cray XT3 and IBM Blue Gene/L (contact us
       for details)
     - Other new ports: Linux/PowerPC, Cray MTA, NetBSD/x86, Linux/Alpha,
         FreeBSD/Alpha, HPUX/Itanium, PathScale & Portland Group compilers
     - Linux 2.6 kernel support for gm, vapi, shmem

* General performance improvements:
     - Replace default barrier implementation on gm, vapi, sci, mpi, udp with 
a
       more scalable barrier implementation.
     - System-wide performance improvements to AM's
     - Improve the performance and functionality of gasnet_trace

* Misc changes:
     - Output improvements to gasnet tests
     - Added MPI performance tests to the GASNet tests for ease of comparison
     - Many robustness improvements to job spawning on various conduits and 
systems
     - New environment variable GASNET_VERBOSEENV turns on global reporting of 

       all environment variables in use
     - Improve the robustness and quality of GASNet's automatic heap 
corruption detection
     - Many, many bug fixes, for both specific conduits and general platform
       portability. See http://upc-bugs.lbl.gov for complete details.

* Myrinet/GM:
     - gm-conduit now provides interoperability with MPI.
     - add support for spawning with mpiexec
     - several robustness and stability improvements

* InfiniBand/VAPI:
     - Use firehose to manage local pinning in SEG_FAST, for performance
     - Add a stand-alone ssh-based spawner, and MPI is no longer
       required to build vapi-conduit.
     - Numerous performance improvements, especially for AM's, non-bulk puts
       and large put/gets (>128KB)
     - Improve firehose region efficiency, improving performance on 
LARGE/EVERYTHING
     - Add support for striping and multiplexing communication over multiple
       queue pairs
     - Add options for controlling the vapi progress thread

* IBM SP/LAPI:
     - Change the default GASNET_LAPI_MODE to POLLING, which vastly
       outperforms INTERRUPT on Power4/Federation
     - Significant performance improvements to barrier

* Quadrics/ELAN:
     - Elan4 functionality and tuning work
     - add support for SLURM spawner
     - Improve queue depth, allowing more non-blocking put/gets to be posted 
without stalling

* CrayX1 & SGI Altix/SHMEM:
     - Significant performance improvements to AM's
     - Many correctness fixes to put/gets and AM's

* Ethernet/UDP:
     - Improve the performance of loopback AM's
     

• Previous message: jcduell_at_lbl_dot_gov: "Berkeley UPC beta release 2"