Does an FAHCore_a7 changelog exist?

[Dr. Merkwürdigliebe]

Hi everybody,

Yesterday I noticed the download of a new FAHCore_a7 version 0.0.17. Is there a changelog somewhere?

Looks like there was an upgrade of gcc from version 4.9.x to 6.3.x.

[toTOW]

It's a minor bugfix in scientific code to allow new studies ...

[Dr. Merkwürdigliebe]

The major change in the compiler version indicates a distribution upgrade on the part of the developer so I was wondering. Usually newer compilers provide for better support of optimization - yes, even if GROMACS is already highly optimized.

[bruce]

Gromacs has a long history of using hand-optimized-Assemply-Language code rather than depending on the (much less effective) compiler optimization for the inner loops. I have not looked at the recent code, but I expect they've updated the methology that they originally developed during the early days of SSE to use similar methods to pack the maximum number of parallel operations into the registers associated with SSE(m) and/or AVX(n). If there are still a few rarely used segments of code that can be optimized by the compiler, it's probably doesn't amount to much.