Open MPI
Message Passing Interface software library
Open MPI is a 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, and K computer, the fastest supercomputer from June 2011 to June 2012.
01Overview
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.
The Open MPI developers selected these MPI implementations as excelling in one or more areas. Open MPI aims to use 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 specifies several top-level goals:
- to create a free, open source software, peer-reviewed, production-quality complete MPI-3.0 implementation
- to provide extremely high, competitive performance (low latency or high bandwidth)
- to involve the high-performance computing community directly with external development and feedback (vendors, 3rd party researchers, users, etc.)
- to provide a stable platform for 3rd-party research and commercial development
- to help prevent the "forking problem" common to other MPI projects
- to support a wide variety of high-performance computing platforms and environments
02Code 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
03Commercial implementations
- Sun HPC Cluster Tools - beginning with version 7, Sun switched to Open MPI
- Bullx MPI, In 2010 Bull announced the release of bullx MPI, based on Open MPI
04Consortium
Open MPI development is performed within a consortium of many industrial and academic partners. The consortium also covers several other software projects such as the hwloc (Hardware Locality) library which takes care of discovering and modeling the topology of parallel platforms.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Open MPI”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Open MPI logo.png by Open MPI, BSD
- Hwloc.png by The Portable Hardware Locality (hwloc) Project. (Screenshot by the Open Source Grid Engine Project), BSD
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