Open MPI

Open MPI

Stable release	1.5.4 / August 18, 2011; 57 days ago (2011-08-18)
Operating system	Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Library
Website	http://www.open-mpi.org/

Open MPI is an Message Passing Interface (MPI) library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI, and PACX-MPI). It is used by many TOP500 supercomputers including Roadrunner, which was the world's fastest supercomputer from June 2008 to November 2009, ^[1] and K computer, the fastest supercomputer since June 2011. ^[2][3]

Overview

Open MPI represents the merger between three well-known MPI implementations:

• FT-MPI from the University of Tennessee
• LA-MPI from Los Alamos National Laboratory
• LAM/MPI from Indiana University

with contributions from the PACX-MPI team at the University of Stuttgart. These four institutions comprise the founding members of the Open MPI development team.

These MPI implementations were selected because the Open MPI developers thought that they excelled in one or more areas. The stated driving motivation behind Open MPI is to bring the best ideas and technologies from the individual projects and create one world-class open source MPI implementation that excels in all areas. The Open MPI project names several top-level goals:

• Create a free, open source software, peer-reviewed, production-quality complete MPI-2 implementation.
• Provide extremely high, competitive performance (low latency or high bandwidth).
• Directly involve the high-performance computing community with external development and feedback (vendors, 3rd party researchers, users, etc.).
• Provide a stable platform for 3rd party research and commercial development.
• Help prevent the "forking problem" common to other MPI projects.
• Support a wide variety of high-performance computing platforms and environments.

Code modules

The Open MPI code has 3 major code modules:

• OMPI - MPI code
• ORTE - the Open Run-Time Environment
• OPAL - the Open Portable Access Layer

Commercial implementations

• Sun HPC Cluster Tools - beginning with version 7, Sun switched to Open MPI

See also

• Message Passing Interface
• MPICH
• OpenMP

References

1. ^ Jeff Squyres. "Open MPI: 10^15 Flops Can't Be Wrong". Open MPI Project. http://www.open-mpi.org/papers/sc-2008/jsquyres-cisco-booth-talk-1up.pdf. Retrieved 2011-09-27. 
2. ^ "Programming on K computer". Fujitsu. http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/TC/sc10/programming-on-k-computer.pdf. Retrieved 2011-09-27. 
3. ^ "Open MPI powers 8 petaflops". Cisco Systems. http://blogs.cisco.com/performance/open-mpi-powers-8-petaflops/. Retrieved 2011-09-27. 

External links

• Open MPI Project Homepage
• RCE01: Open MPI - RCE Podcast interview