ACADEMIA

Coverity Prevent to Ensure Security and Quality of 2 Million Lines of Code in Popular Open Source Supercomputer Framework: Coverity, Inc., the leader in improving software quality and security automatically, today announced a partnership with the Open Message Passing Interface (MPI) project, an advanced computing research and development group. Under the new partnership, Coverity will help improve the security and quality of Open MPI code via its open source Scan site. The Scan site is an outgrowth of Coverity's contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to improve the security and quality of open source software. For more information about Coverity's Scan site, visit: http://scan.coverity.com/ . "We contacted Coverity because an Open MPI user recommended their advanced source code analysis technology. It is highly accurate and can scale to be of great value to the Open MPI project," said Jeff Squyres, a developer for the Open MPI project and high performance computing architect at Cisco. "This will enable our developers to identify and fix defects early in the development cycle, at the stage when it saves the most effort." The Open MPI project develops an open source, freely available version of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard which is often used in parallel and distributed computing. Initially developed by programmers at The University of Indiana and The University of Tennessee, membership in Open MPI project has expanded to represent a broad range of commercial and government organizations including Cisco, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, and Sandia National Lab. As part of today's announcement, Coverity Prevent, the company's flagship static analysis solution, will be used to analyze more than 2 million lines of code from the Open MPI project. Analysis results will be made available to Open MPI developers at no cost via Coverity's Scan site. Coverity will also provide members of the Open MPI project with access to specialized features in Coverity Prevent designed specifically for analyzing source code frequently used in supercomputer applications. "We are proud to partner with Open MPI, because the efforts of this open source project provide direct benefits to the academic and research computer science communities," said David Maxwell, open source strategist at Coverity. "By analyzing the highly specialized code base in the Open MPI project, including a wide variety of modular device drivers, this relationship will also provide our advanced technology group with an opportunity to gain further insight into the nature of software defects in supercomputing environments." Coverity provides free access to its advanced source code analysis solution for over 250 open source projects through its partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. More information is available at: http://scan.coverity.com . Additional information on the Open MPI project, including free downloads of software and technical documentation are available at: www.open-mpi.org .