ACADEMIA

In a landmark announcement for the HPC community, Critical Software announces the release of WMPI II for the Itanium 2 processor family, the first Message Passing Interface (MPI-2) implementation which runs on Windows clusters based on the Intel Itanium 2 architecture. "This is an important release for us and for the HPC community as a whole," stated Peter Tyndale, Business Development Manager for Critical Software. "High Performance Technical Computing is a key area which can benefit from the increased memory capacity of Intel's Itanium 2 processor family but, until now, Windows cluster users were unable to run their MPI applications on this architecture," he added. Critical Software have worked closely with Intel to produce this latest version of WMPI II, with technical and hardware support being provided through the Intel Early Access programme. "The Itanium 2 processor family is designed for business critical enterprise servers and technical computing. We're pleased that the extensive ecosystem supporting Itanium 2 processor is becoming richer with Critical Software's WMPI II product. Intel Architecture platforms provide word-class scalability and performance in the area of HPC. WMPI II now supports all Intel Architecture platforms, offering customers high flexibility," said David P. Ryan, Director Intel Software Enabling EMEA. WMPI II is the only commercially available full implementation of the MPI-2 standard for Windows. It is fully thread safe (OpenMP ready), runs on mixed Windows and Linux clusters and is backed by professional technical support. When asked to quote on the performance of WMPI II on the Itanium 2 platform Peter said:"WMPI II, which is the first implementation of MPI on the Itanium processor family, has produced some impressive benchmark results when compared to 32-bit systems, where WMPI II is already one of the fastest implementations on the market. The main benefit to HPC users is the possibility to compute algorithms with larger problem sizes and space complexity." WMPI II for Windows and Linux is the premium level product of Critical Software's suite of middleware products for HPC, which includes WMPI (based on version 1.2 of the standard), Patent MPI and WMX, a fault-tolerant MPI-like message passing implementation. Critical's HPC middleware products have achieved high recognition among the HPC community, and are being used by a wealth of customers in the telecom, defence, aeronautics, finance, automotive, and energy industries. Critical Software is providing a trial version of the software on its web site at www.criticalsoftware.com/hpc. The trial version provides a preview of all WMPI II features, limited to 4 CPUs for 40 days. The company also provides a wide range of support, consulting, and training services for WMPI II. Finally, the company roadmap includes a Linux release for the Itanium 2 processor family, later this quarter and support for Intel's Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T) in the 4th quarter of 2004 along with support for Infiniband and Myrinet interconnects. Critical Software Inc, San Jose, California, and Coimbra, Portugal, is a leading provider of middleware for High-Performance Computing. The company develops dependable solutions and technologies for mission and business critical systems where performance plays a key role. The company has grown from 3 to 75 engineers from 1998 to 2004, dedicated to solutions engineering and product development in several sectors and markets.