Merging changes of feature/hip-support (and feature/parallel-variable-rate)

[data-panda]

At this point in time there has been quite some modifications on hip-support branch (leading develop by 56 commits and lagging by 176 commits)! Is there a plan anytime soon to sync-up the branches?

Similar is the story with parallel-variable-rate branch which comprises of the variable rate OpenMP compress/decompress functionalities. Any comments on this would also be most welcome!

[lindstro]

We're quite busy with the next release of zfp at the moment, which will not include HIP or parallel decompression support--that will be the topic of the following release. As you have noticed, we are making occasional changes to the two feature branches to meet project deliverables, but due to time constraints little effort has gone into synchronizing branches. Once we're done with the current release, we will finish up these feature branches and merge them into develop. We are targeting a fall 2022 release of these capabilities.

[data-panda]

Thanks @lindstro for the update. Is there also a tentative timeline for the release 0.5.6 (which it seems likely to be coming soon 🍾 )?

[lindstro]

We're very close. Because of numerous ABI incompatibilities with prior releases, we will likely bump the version to 1.0.0. This in turn opens opportunities to make other "major" changes that we have put off for some time, and are a reason we have not yet released this code. I'm hoping we can wrap this up in the next few weeks.

[kwryankrattiger]

Just following up here, I am working on the ecp-data-vis-sdk in spack and we were looking at packages that would have ROCm enabled. I have seen this in the works for awhile, is there a timeline on when it would be ready in a release?

[lindstro]

@kwryankrattiger Apologies for a late response--for some reason GitHub is no longer forwarding issues to me. Let me investigate why.

We just released 1.0.0 today. Updated CUDA and ROCm support will appear on the next release around the end of the year (fingers crossed).

[GarrettDMorrison]

@kwryankrattiger @data-panda a few months later than we'd hoped but with the latest updates to CUDA and ROCm support we have pulled all our parallel compression/decompression changes into a single staging branch. This branch should hopefully be merged into develop soon in preparation for the next release.