Fair enough, all good business reasons not to switch MPI platforms at
Microsoft's end.
Damien
On 2014-07-17 4:29 PM, Fab Tillier wrote:
[resending now that I've joined the Open MPI users list, sorry for the
duplicate]
Hi Jed,
Thanks for looping me on this mail thread.
Jed Brown wrote on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 at 11:19:42
Damien <dam...@khubla.com> writes:
Is this something that could be funded by Microsoft, and is it time
to approach them perhaps? MS MPI is based on MPICH, and if mainline
MPICH isn't supporting Windows anymore, then there won't be a whole
lot of development in an increasingly older Windows build. With the
Open-MPI roadmap, there's a lot happening.
Open-MPI isn't supporting Windows anymore either, and I would think it fair to
say that a lot is happening in both Open-MPI and MPICH (for non-Windows
environments).
Would it be a
better business model for MS to piggy-back off of Open-MPI ongoing
innovation, and put their resources into maintaining a Windows build
of Open-MPI instead?
Microsoft doesn't simply maintain a Windows build of MPICH. While MS-MPI is
derived from MPICH, at this point it is really a more of a fork given how much
Windows-specific work we've done that isn't applicable to the mainline MPICH
development. We're continuing to invest in the development of MS-MPI, and our
focus continues to be on user-requested features. We strongly believe that
users care more about feature content than which codebase we are derived from -
after all, portability is one of the main goals of the MPI standard.
We've worked very hard to maintain ABI over the various versions of MS-MPI, and
a fundamental shift to a different implementation would wreak havoc on users
and our ISV partners.
Maybe Fab can comment on Microsoft's intentions regarding MPI and
C99/C11 (just dreaming now).
I can't really comment on the C99/C11 stuff, as that's a completely different
organization within Microsoft. Rob seems to have shed some light on this
(thanks for finding that Rob!)
From an MPI perspective, we've been investing in making ourselves available to
our user and developer community, whether through email
(mailto:ask...@microsoft.com, CC'd), through our beta program on Microsoft
Connect (https://connect.microsoft.com/HPC/MS-MPI), where users can request
(and vote for) features (https://connect.microsoft.com/HPC/Feedback), or
through our web forums
(http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home?forum=windowshpcmpi). We'd very
much like to get input from our user community to help shape our features
content going forward.
I'm not familiar with PETSc, but would be happy to develop a closer
relationship with the developers to enable better integration of MS-MPI into
the PETSc environment. Conceptually, a --download-msmpi option would be great,
and we already allow redistribution of our installer package with third party
applications (to enable bundling) if that makes more sense.
-Fab
On 2014-07-17 11:42 AM, Jed Brown wrote:
Rob Latham <r...@mcs.anl.gov> writes:
Well, I (and dgoodell and jsquyers and probably a few others of
you) can say from observing disc...@mpich.org traffic that we get
one message about Windows support every month -- probably more often.
Seems to average at least once a week. We also see regular petsc
support emails wondering why --download-{mpich,openmpi} does not
work on Windows. (These options are pretty much only used by
beginners for whom PETSc is their first encounter with MPI.)
