Marking the end of over 2 years of active development, the Open MPI project has released a new “stable” series of releases starting with v1.6.

Specifically, Open MPI maintains two concurrent release series:

• Odd number releases are “feature development” releases (e.g., 1.5.x).  They’re considered to be stable and test, but not yet necessarily “mature” (i.e., have lots of real-world usage to shake out bugs).  New features are added over the life of feature development releases.
• Even number releases are “super stable” releases (e.g., 1.6.x).  After enough time, feature development releases transition into super stable releases — the new functionality has been vetted by enough real world usage to be considered stable enough for production sites.

Conceptually, it looks like this:

The new v1.6 series effectively deprecates the older v1.4 “super stable” series.  All users are encouraged to upgrade to the v1.6 series.

We haven’t yet branched for v1.7 yet; it’s up to the v1.7 release managers (Ralph Castain of Greenplum and Brian Barrett of Sandia National Laboratories) as to when that will happen. I think there’s still a few more things Ralph and Brian want to be completed on our development trunk before we branch. As a SWAG, figure we’ll release v1.7 later this year.

Tags: HPC, mpi