The PHISH "version" is the date when it was released, such as 1 Nov 2012. PHISH is updated continuously. Whenever we fix a bug or add a feature, we release it immediately, and post a notice on this page of the WWW site. Each dated copy of PHISH contains all the features and bug-fixes up to and including that version date. Each time you use the bait.py tool, the version date is printed to the screen. It is also in the file bait/version.py and in the PHISH directory name created when you unpack a tarball.
PHISH stands for Parallel Harness for Informatic Stream Hashing. The phishy metaphor is meant to evoke the image of many small minnows (programs) swimming in a stream (of data).
PHISH is a lightweight framework which a set of independent processes can use to exchange data as they run on the same desktop machine, on processors of a parallel machine, or on different machines across a network. This enables them to work in a coordinated parallel fashion to perform computations on either streaming, archived, or self-generated data.
The PHISH distribution includes a simple, portable library for performing data exchanges in useful patterns either via MPI message-passing or ZMQ sockets. PHISH input scripts are used to describe a data-processing algorithm, and additional tools provided in the PHISH distribution convert the script into a form that can be launched as a parallel job.
PHISH was developed at Sandia National Laboratories, a US Department of Energy facility, with funding from the DOE. It is an open-source code, distributed freely under the terms of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) License.
The authors of PHISH are Steve Plimpton and Tim Shead who can be contacted at sjplimp, tshead at sandia.gov. The PHISH WWW Site at http://www.sandia.gov/~sjplimp/phish.html has more information about the code and its uses.
The PHISH documentation is organized into the following sections. If you find errors or omissions in this manual or have suggestions for useful information to add, please send an email to the developers so we can improve the PHISH documentation.