July 2005 We have two approaches to solving the SMP problem and are experimenting with them in parallel. Both are pretty early stage, but appear to work reasonably well in the lab. The biggest challenge right now appears to be server side.
August 2005 Abhay has been making steady progress here. We are trying two approaches: a pure SMP approach as well as an approach which would also work on computer clusters. There are pros and cons of each and having both programs allows us to take the best version.
September 2005 Abhay has found that we need to change the Gromacs code base used. We’re working on the switch with Prof. Peck’s group.
November 2005 We have had some snags with the code. Prof. Peck will be coming out to Stanford in early 2006 and that should help push this through.
January 2006 We have been talking with the Gromacs developers about a threads-based solution as well, which would have many benefits over an MPI solution for multi-core CPUs/SMP.
July 2006 Discussions with Gromacs developers suggest that their code development is going well, but a bit delayed. The good news is that the delay is due to added functionality, so when it does ship, we should be in good shape.
October 2006 We have had some good success with a new direction for the SMP client. We are optimistic that this will be reasonable to release. Once the GPU client is a little further along, we will put more attention into this direction.
November 2006 The SMP client is now looking good enough that we are starting a more broad beta test outside of Stanford. If that looks good, we will move to a completely open beta test of this new client. The SMP client supports OSX/Intel natively (which means a major points boost for OSX donors) as well as 64-bit linux (with 32-bit linux hopefully to come soon). Windows support will come much later, as this is a very different architecture for porting than OSX & Linux.
March 2007 We have released a version of the SMP client for 32-bit Windows. There are some unique quirks due to the nature of running MPI on Windows, but it’s a natural choice for donors who need or want to run Windows.
April 2008 We have continued to update our SMP core, most notably including our A2 core, which has much better scalability.