Re: [BProc] bproc-4 and MPICH

[<er...@he...>]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 12:08:09AM +0100, J.A. Magallon wrote:
> Hi all...
> 
> I would like to try bproc-4.0.0-pre1, but I have a couple questions:
> - What advantages does it offer vs 3.2.6 ?
> - Is it source-compatible, for example, to build MPICH-1.2.5.2 ?

The biggest change is the "bpfs" virtual file system stuff for node
status.  This completely replaces the old way of getting node status
information which involved talking to the master daemon.  The
advantage is that it's MUCH faster for doing the kinds of things a
scheduler does (chmod, chown, etc.).  On our 1024 node system, the
scheduler is about 100x faster as a result.

Opteron support is also only in 4.0.0pre1 at this point.  That should
be easy to copy to the other one though.

There are a bunch of smallish API changes too.  The goal there was to
clean things up a bit and get rid of some crud.  That's definitely a
work in progress.

The MPICH hacks are going to require some changes.  Somebody here has
done them so it's probably time to create a new tarball of that stuff.
This should be done for "Clustermatic 4" in about a week or so.

- Erik