Mpiexec release 0.77: poll scalability, new MPI/IB, Torque PBS

[Pete Wyckoff]

Over the last 5 months, one big scalability improvement appeared.  Also
support was added for a new version of MPI on InfiniBand and for the
Torque distribution of PBS.

Poll scalability

    No part of mpiexec uses select() any more, thanks to Alex Korobka
    who supplied a patch to convert to using poll() instead.  The main
    advantage of poll() is that it can scale to much larger processor
    count; select() was effectively limited to 1024 processes on x86
    machines.  While the poll() code is in production use here at OSC,
    there is a configure option --disable-poll if it causes problems for
    anyone.

New MPI on InfiniBand version and fix

    The MVAPICH implementation of MPICH on InfiniBand from Ohio State
    University was updated to version 0.9.4 and includes a different,
    much more streamlined, startup protocol.  The previous version 0.9.2
    caused problems with mpiexec because some installations did not
    supply a version number at startup leading to protocol mismatches.
    This mpiexec 0.77 release both fixes that old problem and supports
    the new MVAPICH code, auto-detecting at runtime which protocol to
    use.

Included Torque PBS patch

    Torque, another free version of PBS, is sufficiently different from
    its parent OpenPBS 2.3.12 code base that the usual mpiexec patch
    does not apply.  However, there may be relief on two fronts:  first,
    Brett Pemberton contributed a patch (included) that may work with
    some versions of Torque; and second, some pre-releases of Torque do
    have this patch applied.  I'm not sure exactly what versions of
    Torque qualify in either category (patchable or patched), but
    inspection of the included torque patch and the source files should
    show what is needed.

Other little fixes.

    The Intel compiler lies and claims it is GCC but it doesn't accept
    all of GCC's options.  Now the configure script detects that and
    adds some Intel-specific options too.  Two big source files were
    becoming unmanageable (start_tasks.c and stdio.c) and were split up
    into three new source files (ib.c, gm.c, and pmi.c).


Full changelog and downloads at:  http://www.osc.edu/~pw/mpiexec/
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		-- Pete