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             Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)
              MVAPICH2-0.9.8 in OFED 1.2 Release Notes

                          August 2007


Overview
--------

These are the release notes for MVAPICH2-0.9.8.  This is OFED's edition of
the MVAPICH2-0.9.8 release. MVAPICH2 is an MPI2 implementation over
InfiniBand from Ohio State University (OSU)
(http://nowlab.cse.ohio-state.edu/projects/mpi-iba/).

Software Dependencies
---------------------

MVAPICH2 depends on the installation of the OFED Distribution stack with
OpenSM running. The MPI module also requires an established network
interface (either InfiniBand, IPoIB, or Ethernet). BLCR support is needed
if built with fault tolerance support.

New Features
------------

MVAPICH2 (MPI-2 over InfiniBand) is an MPI-2 implementation based on
MPICH2. MVAPICH2 0.9.8 is available as a single integrated package (with
MPICH2 1.0.3). This version of MVAPICH2-0.9.8 for OFED has the following
additional features:

- RDMA CM-based connection management support for OFA Gen2 interface
- Support for OFA iWARP: This is for the emerging 10GigE adapters
  supporting OFA iWARP interface
- Fault tolerance support
    * Checkpoint-restart support for application transparent systems-level
      fault tolerance. BLCR-based support using native OFA Gen2 interface
    * Flexible interface to work with different files systems. Tested with
      ext3 (local disk), NFS and PVFS2
- Efficient Buffer Organization for Memory Scalability of Intra-node
  Communication
- Shared memory optimizations for collective communication operations

Main Verification Flows
-----------------------
In order to verify the correctness of MVAPICH2-0.9.8, the following tests
and parameters were run.

Test                            Description
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Intel                           Intel's MPI functionality test suite
OSU Benchmarks                  OSU's performance tests
IMB                             Intel's MPI Benchmark test
mpich2                          Test suite distributed with MPICH2
mpitest                         b_eff test
Linpack                         Linpack benchmark
NAS                             NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB3.2)
NAMD                            NAMD application

User Guide and Mailing List
---------------------------

For more information regarding installing/using MVAPICH2-0.9.8, please
visit the online user guide at:
http://nowlab.cse.ohio-state.edu/projects/mpi-iba/download-mvapich2/mvapich2_user_guide.html

There is a public mailing list mvapich-discuss@cse.ohio-state.edu for
mvapich users or developers to
- Ask for help and support from each other and get prompt response
- Contribute patches and enhancements


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