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March 14th, 2006
Open MPI poised to drive open standards for commercial
high-performance computing
Bloomington, IND - The Open MPI Project, an alliance of organizations
dedicated to providing a high-quality, open source implementation of
the Message Passing Interface (MPI), is pleased to announce Cisco
Systems, Inc. as its first commercial member. While members of the
alliance have traditionally been universities and research
institutions, one of the Open MPI Project's core philosophies centers
on engaging the entire high performance computing (HPC) community,
including the commercial sector.
"Cisco's membership is a welcome addition, bringing the commercial
perspective of the HPC community into the Project," said Andrew
Lumsdaine, one of Open MPI's founding members and director of Indiana
University's Open Systems Lab. Cisco will work within the Open MPI
Project to help drive the adoption of Open MPI as an industry standard
with other networking and system vendors, with the goal of simplifying
application development and supporting wide-spread end-user adoption.
The Open MPI software enables scientists and engineers to create
applications that can utilize large-scale parallel and distributed
computing resources. Open MPI is "network neutral" software that
transparently allows applications to run networks built using
technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and
Infiniband.
As one of the leading vendors in HPC, Cisco is uniquely positioned to
help independent software vendors and end-users to develop and adopt
open standards-based MPI applications. Jeff Squyres, a founding member
and core contributor to the Open MPI Project, will be joining Cisco as
MPI architect, leading development efforts within Cisco's new Open MPI
development team. Squyres is formerly a senior member of Indiana
University's Open Systems Lab.
HPC is both an active field of research and an expanding enterprise
market. "Standardizing industry and research efforts on an open source
production-quality MPI platform benefits the entire community by
allowing researchers to exchange knowledge and experience in a common
environment, and then facilitating the incorporation of the results of
that research into real-world products," explained Squyres. "This
allows independent software vendors, server vendors, and networking
vendors to work from a common interface. As a result, customers will
be able to rapidly integrate new applications, simplify necessary
certifications, and gain choice in network fabric types."
About Open MPI
Open MPI (www.open-mpi.org) is
a project combining the technologies and resources from several other
projects (FT-MPI from the University of Tennessee, LA-MPI from Los
Alamos National Laboratory, LAM/MPI from Indiana University, and
PACX-MPI from the High Performance Computing Center at Stuttgart) in
order to build the best MPI library available. A completely new MPI-2
compliant implementation, Open MPI offers advantages for systems and
software vendors, application developers, and computer science
researchers.
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