Quarterly Newsletter, July 2021

Publication news:

  • Pierre Matri and Robert Ross. “Neon: Low-Latency Streaming Pipelines for HPC”, to appear in IEEE Cloud 2021, Sept 5-10 2021.
    • Introduces a new Mochi service for stream processing
  • Stay tuned for more Mochi-related publications at SC21 in November. More details will be posted once the SC21 technical program is announced.

Recent development updates:

  • A proof-of-concept of UCX support in Mercury is available in the master-ucx version of Mercury in the Mochi Spack repository
    • Please contact us if you are interested in this capability; it is under active development and should be considered experimental at this time.
  • The git origin/main branch of Margo includes new safety checks to ensure compatible Argobots runtime parameters if Argobots is initialized outside of Margo. This will be available in an upcoming release after coordinating updates to other Mochi packages.
  • Both Mochi and Margo have new Contributor License Agreement (CLA) documents available online as of July 2021 with more relaxed language than the previous version. We will soon streamline these even further with online electronic forms that will be activated within the GitHub contribution process.

Debugging tips:

  • We have encountered several bug reports on Libfabric 1.13.0 in the last few days, especially with the RXM provider. Debugging is in progress, but in the mean time you may want to consider reverting to an earlier release if you encounter communication problems.
  • Recent libfabric releases also include a new PSM3 provider. PSM3 is not directly supported by Mercury / Mochi, but enabling it in libfabric may interfere with the performance of the traditional PSM2 provider. The libfabric package in the Mochi spack repository disables PSM3 by default for now to avoid this problem.