SST 14.0.0 has been released

[gvoskuilen]

SST 14.0.0 Released

SST v14.0.0 is now available and can be downloaded here

The SST 14.0.0 release contains several performance enhancements and functionality improvements. A selection of the improvement highlights are:

General

• SST has reintroduced checkpoint/restart support. The implementation in this release is preliminary and has a number of (temporary) limitations which we plan to address in upcoming releases. See the guide here.
  • Checkpoint support required that the type for Event::Handler and Clock::Handler functions change. These are deprecated and should be replaced by Event::Handler2 and Clock::Handler2 respectively. In a future release, the Handler type will be changed to match the new Handler2 types. See the checkpointing guide linked above for details.
• New libraries mercury, iris, and mask-mpi port the application skeletonization capabilities that SST-Macro provided into the large SST element ecosystem so that it can more easily be used with other element libraries (e.g., merlin network)
• An interactive sst-info utility has been released. The utility includes improved search and discovery capabilities. The utility requires that the ncurses.h header be available during compilation. Invoke the utility using sst-info -i. The non-interactive utility is still available using sst-info without the interactive flag.

Deprecation and Removal Notices

• Removed previously deprecated functions: Link::sendInitData(), Link::recvInitData(), SimpleNetwork::sendInitData(), SimpleNetwork::recvInitData() and BaseComponent::getSimulation() have been removed. The simulation.h header file is also removed.
  • See the new deprecation history page for suggested alternatives
• The SST_ELI_REGISTER_SUBCOMPONENT_DERIVED and SST_ELI_REGISTER_MODULE_DERIVED macros are removed
  • See the new deprecation history page for suggested alternatives
• The SimpleMem interface is removed. Use the StandardMem interface instead.
• The Event::Handler and Clock::Handler handler types are deprecated in favor of Event::Handler2 and Clock::Handler2. The new types support checkpoint/restart. See checkpoint guide for details. Eventually the Handler names will be reintroduced to match the new Handler2 types.

SST-Core

• Added preliminary checkpoint/restart support. See checkpoint guide for details and check back often for updates.
  • Added ability to track pointers to serialization infrastructure
  • Added ability to serialize non-pointer variables and also track the address of those variables as a pointer
• Added serialization support for SST::RNG, SST::Distrib, SST::SharedObject, std::priority_queue, std::atomic, std::multiset,
• Functions in the UnitAlgebra class now throw exceptions instead of causing fatal errors. Not handling the exception will result in a fatal error as before but the exceptions can be handled by calling classes to improve error messages and/or handle the error without a failure.
• Fixes to support Python 3.12
• Added getSimulationOutput(), getNumRanks, getRank, and getCurrentSimCycle to the StatisticOutput class to replace global accessors previously available through Simulation::getSimulation()
• SimpleNetwork
  • Deprecated functions recvInitData and sendInitData are removed
  • sendUntimedData and recvUntimedData are now pure virtual
• Disabled fused floating-point operations under Clang to preserve determinism across platforms
• Added information about elements python modules to sst-info output
• Added fflush to all TraceFunction output
• Removed unused references to SharedRegion
• Added interactive sst-info utility
• Doxygen documentation updates in several files
• Fixed issue when using pushNamePrefix() in python with empty string to eliminate spurious '.' prefixes
• Changed python config output to use link name in python instead of link ID based name
• Fixed performance issue on Mac where building links in parallel was slow due to high cost of delete.
• Added check to main simulation loop to detect time moving backwards or rollover of the 64bit core time counter
• Fixed compile error when calling Statistic::addDataNTimes
• Added interface for accessing CustomReq/Resp data in StandardMem
• Fixed issue where UnitAlgebra objects passed through the python input were rounded
• Added functions for pretty-printing UnitAlgebra in python
• Fixed formatting in StandardMem toString() functions
• Fixed issue where command line options were not overriding options set in the input file

SST-Elements

• New libraries iris and mask-mpi added to support mercury
• Ariel
  • Fixed use after free error in Ariel's pintool
  • Added SIMD width and instruction class info to ariel instructions to fix statistics
• Ember
  • Added HotSpots motif
• Firefly
  • Fixed mispelled parameter name in pyfirefly
• MemHierarchy
  • Added parameter to set noncacheable address ranges - supports multiple coherence domains
  • Fixed bug in the directory controller where event was not getting retried
  • Bug fixes in MSI protocol
  • Fix for prefetch bug that incorrectly counted and dropped prefetches
  • Added support for writing out and restoring malloc'd backed memory (supports application checkpointing in Vanadis)
    • Note that full application checkpoint support is not yet functional - pending cache flush updates in the cache models
• Merlin
  • Fixed network bridge (e.g., for dual-socket configurations)
  • Changed merlin python topology builder add network name prefix and enabled building endpoints after network is constructed
  • Fixed bug with brodcasts during untimed phases when using a nid map in LinkControl
• Vanadis
  • Add support for RV64 AMO.OR, AMO.ADD, AMO.XOR, AMO.AND, AMO.MIN, AMO.MAX, MULHSU, FCSR, FSQRT.S, FCVT.S.L, FCVT.WU.S, FCVT.L.S, FMADD.S, FMSUB.S, RDCYCLE (this is not an exhaustive list of newly supported instructions)
  • Added VanadisMinInstruction and floating point instruction class (VanadisFPClassInstruction)
  • Support for clone syscall in glibc
  • Several bug fixes
  • Added testing for the riscv-tests suite (https://github.com/riscv/riscv-tests)
  • Added support for passing application arguments and environment to Vanadis through environment variables VANADIS_EXE_ARGS and VANADIS_EXE_ENV. Passing as parameters is also supported.
  • MVAPICH now works
  • Began added application checkpoint support: write/restore of page table and processor state
    • Note that full application checkpoint support is not yet functional - pending cache flush updates in the memHierarchy cache models

SST-Macro

• Fixed issues with building under Apple XCode 15
  • Note: We continue to encounter occasional bugs when running under various XCode versions.
• Minor updates to address compilation warnings and deprecations in SST-Core
• Fix to addess segv when printing command line options

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Current release information can be found here

We look forward to hearing your successes with the latest release!

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SST Research and Product Teams

Sandia National Laboratories, USA