From the start updating department

One of my favorite projects, Open-MX just announced the final release of version 1.3.0. There are only some very minor changes since the last release candidate, mostly a fix for a latency regression. The 1.2.x branch is officially no longer maintained and upgrade to 1.3.0 is strongly recommended.

What is Open-MX You Ask?

The following middleware are known to work flawlessly on Open-MX using their native MX backend thanks to the ABI and API compatibility: Open MPI, Argonne's MPICH2/Nemesis, Myricom's MPICH-MX and MPICH2-MX, PVFS2, Intel MPI (using the new TMI interface), Platform MPI (formerly known as HP-MPI), and NewMadeleine.

From the in your neighborhood department

The Hardware Locality (hwloc) team, which is affiliated with the nearby OpenMPI team, has announced the release of version 1.0 of hwloc.

hwloc provides command line tools and a C API to obtain the hierarchical map of key computing elements, such as: NUMA memory nodes, shared caches, processor sockets, processor cores, and processor "threads". hwloc also gathers various attributes such as cache and memory information, and is portable across a variety of different operating systems and platforms.

The hwloc team considers version 1.0 to be the first production-quality release that is suitable for widespread adoption. Please send your feedback on hwloc experiences to our mailing lists (see the web site, above).

Thanks team, keep up the good work, and don't go anywhere.

From the "other" department

First things first, I put up a new poll. For me, it an intriguing question that reflects a shift in technology: How would you use a 48 core PC (4P with 12 core Magny-Cours) next to your desk? Does ti mean the end to your cluster use? While you are at it, you may want to think about what you would do with 16 cores under your desk? By the end of the year many people will start making this decision with their wallets. As always, past ClusterMonkey polls can be found here.

Now for a bit of shameless self promotion.

I have been writing quite a lot about clusters and HPC, but it has not landed on ClusterMonkey! Not to worry, I have plenty of ClusterMonkey exclusive content in the pipeline. So what do I recommend? Well, let's start with two articles at HPC Community:

• The Ethernet Cluster - discusses some issues and standards for the upcoming 10 GigE cluster. Yes, there will be 10 GigE clusters, lot's of them.
• The Cluster Decade - provides a retrospective for the last ten years and discusses why clusters steam rolled everything in sight (almost), but still have challenges.

Moving over to Linux Magazine, I usually write a column each week, but the other week I wrote one I think everyone should read. I'll give you a hint it is about toasters, no HPC needed. If you want to keep abreast of what I write on Linux Magazine sign up for the HPC newsletter.

And finally, I don't know if mentioned it here previously, but I am on twitter. I'm probably the worst at posting things to twitter, so if you do the twit thing, you can read for my low frequency tweets about new articles or news I find particularly interesting (and nothing about my social life, that should tell you something)

Editors Note: This article is part two in a two-part series, published under Creative Commons License. For those that may not know, Erik Troan is one of the original authors of RPM (Red Hat Package Manager). As Erik describes, it seems the declarative approach may extend beyond programming languages and into better system management.

I’ve made a couple of posts recently about Why Scripting is Evil. It has generated some conversation about what a script is and what the alternatives are. One commentator must have anticipated this follow-up post when he said:

"So, somewhere in the process, a script is a necessary object, whether it is explicit (written by the user) or inherent (created through abstraction and based on the user’s description of desired outcome)".

In short, the only way to do away with scripting is to create an application that abstracts the scripting process. Automated scripting would then be based on user descriptions of the desired outcome/goal rather than having the user describe the steps to reach said goal.