Sat, 23 Jun 2007

New OpenMPI packages

Debian had OpenMPI package since early last year when Florian Ragwitz made some initial stabs at packaging. The package has seen a number of NMU and patches since then, but was generally getting cobwebs ... which was too bad because OpenMPI seems to have some wind behind its sails upstream. Unfortunately, little of that got packaged for Debian.

After some discussions on and around the debian-science list, a new maintainer group was formed on Alioth under the pkg-openmpi name. Tilman Koschnick (who had already helped Florian with patches), Manuel Prinz, Sylvestre Ledru and myself have gotten things in good enough shape in reasonably short time. And I have just uploaded a lintian-clean package set openmpi_1.2.3-0 to Debian, where it is expected to sit in the NEW queue for a little bit before moving on to the archive proper. The changelog entry (which will appear here eventually) shows twelve bugs closed.

Our plan is to provide a stable and well maintained MPI implementation for Debian. OpenMPI is the designated successor to LAM, and apart from MPICH2, everybody seems to have thrown their weight behind OpenMPI. So we will try to work with the other MPI maintainers to come up with sensible setups, alternatives priorities and the likes. If you are interested in MPI and would like to help, come join us at the Alioth project pkg-openmpi.

Last but not least, thanks to Florian for the initial packaging, and to Clint Adams, Mark Hymers, Andreas Barth, and Steve Langasek (twice even) for NMUs.

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