As you are undoubtedly aware, we just released LAM/MPI 7.1 this past
weekend. This seems like a fortuitous time to fill you in on some of
our future plans with regards of LAM/MPI and our ongoing research work.
As we have hinted at a few times over the past few months on the LAM
user's mailing list, we have some heavy duty research and development
efforts that have been progressing behind the scenes for quite some
time. Indeed, our next-generation of LAM/MPI is so different that we
gave it a new name: Open MPI.
Over the past year, we took all the "best" stuff out of the LAM 7.x
series, merged it with similar "best" technologies from LA-MPI (from
Los Alamos National Laboratory), FT-MPI (from the University of
Tennessee), PACX-MPI (from the University of Stuttgart), and MVAPICH
(from The Ohio State University). Developers from all 5 institutions
are working together on this project to put together one stupendous
implementation of MPI. Open MPI will be our path forward for new and
exciting research directions -- it's fundamentally designed to be a
production-quality implementation, yet also be highly customizable to
the system administrator and end user while also allowing third party
developers to use it as a stable development platform for their own
research about parallel computing.
Here's an abbreviated list of features in Open MPI:
- All of MPI-1 and MPI-2
- Support the popular commodity high-speed networks:
- TCP
- Shared memory
- Myrinet
- Infiniband
- Quadrics
- True simultaneous multi-device transport support (e.g., striping
across multiple networks)
- Full support for MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE
- Asynchronous message passing progress
There's no publicly-available software yet -- our first release will be
at the Supercomputing conference in the 2nd week of November (if you're
coming to SC, stop by and see us at the Indiana University, Los Alamos,
or Krell booths). We're making this [perhaps premature] announcement
because a) several papers about Open MPI were presented at the Euro
PVM/MPI conference this week, and b) the Open MPI web site is now open
for business (http://www.open-mpi.org/). Hence, rather than answer
everyone's questions individually, we figured that we'd share the great
news pre-emptively. :-)
Stop by the Open MPI web site for a few more details and to sign up on
the announcements mailing list:
http://www.open-mpi.org/
--
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} jsquyres_at_[hidden]
{+} http://www.lam-mpi.org/
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