Our progress

[John Hall]

Gang:
I just thought I would tell you about our status in our unfunded 
migration to the head version of Pooma R2. We are there. All of our open 
code base is now sitting on top of the head version of Pooma R2 and we 
are using all the new features except the extended centering options 
(this will require another pass). All of the regression tests I have run 
so far have passed as of this night. This is a lot of code and it puts 
Pooma through a grinder. Everything looks terrific though. We will 
probably try and get some timings to compare it to the old version in a 
little while. Thanks for all your hard work.

In some other news, Jean Marshall has just gotten a job with Embarcadero 
Technologies, the makers of Describe (formerly GDPro) and she will be 
leaving the lab by either retirement or entreprenurial leave. Don 
Marshall is still a year away from retiring and is currently trying to 
work on Shavano. Dave Nystrom has moved to X-2 and is working on 
Crestone. There is a possibility that instead of quitting the lab like I 
had intended, I might finally be granted a change of station to 
Carlsbad, NM by Bill Press. There is an office for LANL there with 
around 35 people. If that continues to move forward then I will be 
working 1/2 time for Brown Rogers of X-4 and 1/2 time for Jim Morel of 
CCS-4. Even if I leave, I intend to find a way to finish the project 
that Don, Jean, Dave and I had started.

Since KCC has been discontinued by Intel, there will probably be a 
renewed interest in GCC by LANL. I have already put Mark Mitchell into 
contact with Marv Alme from the Antero team and it looks like a new 
contract for GCC might eventually be forthcoming there. Marv is excited 
by the work Mark has been doing.

Does anyone know the status of gcc/mpi/smarts/mm... on the new unix 
based Mac OS-X. Can I prototype parallel code on my G4 powerbook? This 
would go a long ways toward my getting the new version of our code 
running in parallel. Everything to this point has been CodeWarrior in 
serial on a mac and a PC.

Thanks,
John Hall