On Oct 20, 2004, at 10:38 AM, Damien Hocking wrote:
> This is probably a question for Jeff. Do you envisage that LAM-MPI
> will eventually be retired in 2 - 3 years, with the R&D effort moving
> to OpenMPI, or will LAM continue as a separate entity? Or is too
> early to know?
LAM will eventually be retired. The 7.1 series is likely to be the
last major release of LAM/MPI.
(a moment of silence)
It's been a great run, but there are so many historical decisions built
into LAM that -- as I mentioned in another mail either today or
yesterday -- it would take a Herculean effort to change them to do some
new and interesting things. For example: supporting
MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE. Yes, we *could* re-tool LAM to do it, but it's
far simpler to start from scratch, taking everything that we (and
several other MPI implementation teams) have learned and make a new
design that "does everything right."
So we will eventually be de-emphasizing LAM/MPI and emphasizing Open
MPI. Clearly, we won't be doing that until Open MPI is available. :-)
Fear not, however, we'll still answer LAM mail and do the best that we
can with questions and whatnot. The web site will obviously not
disappear overnight; even deprecated software can't simply be retired
immediately.
Sidenote: just like we've been trying to make sure that everyone knows
that the formal name is "LAM/MPI" for years and years (to denote that
it's actually 2 systems -- the run-time environment [LAM] and the MPI
layer that uses it), the formal name of this new project is "Open MPI"
(two words). I suspect that this will be an uphill battle as well.
;-)
--
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} jsquyres_at_[hidden]
{+} http://www.lam-mpi.org/
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