[mvapich-discuss] Announcing the release of MVAPICH2-Virt 2.2rc1 with container support

[Panda, Dhabaleswar]

The MVAPICH team is pleased to announce the release of MVAPICH2-Virt
2.2 rc1, which targets virtual machine based and container based HPC
cloud computing environments with InfiniBand, SR-IOV and OpenStack.

MVAPICH2-Virt incorporates designs that take advantage of the new
features and mechanisms of high-performance networking technologies
with SR-IOV as well as other virtualization technologies such as
Inter-VM Shared Memory (IVSHMEM), IPC enabled Inter-Container Shared
Memory (IPC-SHM), Cross Memory Attach (CMA), and OpenStack.

For SR-IOV-enabled InfiniBand virtual machine environments and
InfiniBand based container environments, MVAPICH2-Virt has very little
overhead compared to MVAPICH2 running over InfiniBand in native mode.

MVAPICH2-Virt can deliver the best performance and scalability to MPI
applications running inside both virtual machines and containers over
SR-IOV enabled InfiniBand clusters. MVAPICH2-Virt 2.2 rc1 is based on
the standard MVAPICH2 2.2 rc1 release.

Features for MVAPICH2-Virt 2.2 rc1 are listed here.

* Features and Enhancements (since 2.1):
  - Based on MVAPICH2 2.2rc1
  - High-performance and locality-aware MPI communication with IPC-SHM
    and CMA for containers
  - Support for locality auto-detection in containers
  - Automatic communication channel selection among IPC-SHM, CMA, and
    HCA
  - Support for easy configuration through runtime parameters
  - Tested with
    - Docker 1.9.1 and 1.10.3
    - Mellanox InfiniBand adapters (ConnectX-3 (56Gbps))

If you are trying to run MVAPICH2-Virt 2.2rc1 package for VMs, then
the following software packages need to be installed on your system:

  - Mellanox InfiniBand adapters and OFED with SR-IOV support
  - KVM + QEMU-1.7.0 (with IVSHMEM)
  - (optional) OpenStack Juno

If you are trying to run MVAPICH2-Virt 2.2rc1 package for containers,
then the following software package needs to be installed on your
system:

  - Docker 1.9.1+

For downloading MVAPICH2-Virt 2.2 rc1, please visit the following URL:

http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu

For more details on this package, please refer to the MVAPICH2-Virt
user guide available at the following URL:

http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu/userguide/virt/

Sample performance numbers for MVAPICH2-Virt 2.2 rc1 are available
from the `Performance' tab of the MVAPICH web page.

All questions, feedback, bug reports, hints for performance tuning,
and enhancements are welcome. Please post it to the mvapich-discuss
mailing list (mvapich-discuss at cse.ohio-state.edu).

Thanks,

The MVAPICH Team