Good-bye to 32 bit apps?

We currently compile FDS and Smokeview for MS Windows, Linux, and Apple OS X. We release both a 32 bit and 64 bit version of each program for each OS. Maintaining the 32 bit apps is becoming increasingly troublesome, and we anticipate that in the coming year we will drop support for 32 bit operating systems. I suspect that this will not be an issue for Linux and OS X users, but we do not know about Windows. MS no longer supports Windows XP, the last OS to come with 32 bit as the default, but there might still be a lot of these machines around. So this is an opportunity for any and all 32 bit users to make their case for us to continue supporting 32 bit. If we do not see a significant call for keeping 32 bit, we will drop it to simplify our compilation and release activities.

FDS Parallel Processing using MPI (Message Passing Interface)

The latest release of FDS (6.1.0) runs with OpenMP by default; that is, the code uses multiple cores/processors of a single computer to process a single mesh. In other words, OpenMP is a "shared memory, multi-processor" form of parallel processing. We are now looking at the MPI version of FDS. This is where we use multiple computers to process multiple meshes -- distributed memory, multi-processor. For linux and OS X, we use Open MPI, an open-source, free set of MPI libraries. For Windows, we have been using MPICH2 (MPI-2), a similar set of libraries distributed by Argonne National Labs. We've recently learned that the MPICH team is dropping support for Windows, and a team from Microsoft has developed MS-MPI, a similar set of libraries as MPICH, to take its place. We have experimented with MS-MPI recently, but we discovered that MS-MPI is designed for use on a Windows HPC server, essentially a dedicated cluster of computers running a special OS specifically for high performance computing. MPICH had the advantage of running on an ordinary office network. We recognize that this is probably a common configuration for small engineering firms. Now with support for MPICH on Windows going away, and MS-MPI not quite what we are looking for, we are searching for another alternative. There are two, that we know of. First, Open MPI can, in theory, port to Windows, but we discovered that it involves installing Cygwin, essentially a unix/linux emulator for MS Windows. That proved to be quite onerous. Next, there is Intel MPI. At NIST, we use Intel compilers for both FDS and Smokeview releases. Intel sells its own MPI libraries as an add-on to its existing compilers. It also would allow us to distribute the run-time libraries needed for you to be able to run our compiled version of FDS. We are currently testing Intel MPI, and while we do, if any of you has any experience with it or comments in general on MPI, we'd like to hear from you. You can post your comments via the FDS-SMV Discussion Group under this thread.