ENGINEERING

ASPEED Software plans to include Critical Software’s high performance fault tolerant message passing technology in its next release of ACCELLERANT expected later this month. “We were looking for a robust messaging technology that would deliver optimum and reliable communication performance for moving data among our ACCELLERANT On-Demand Application servers,” said Kurt Ziegler, Executive Vice President of Development at ASPEED. “We needed a middleware that would fit seamlessly into out application software and would be totally transparent to the underlying infrastructure, only Critical Software could deliver.” Critical Software is well known in the high performance computing (HPC) sector which makes extensive use of its WMPI II software product. WMPI II is a full implementation of version 2 of the MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard. To address ASPEED’s needs Critical Software specifically developed a new message passing layer called WMX which provides high performance messaging combined with the level of fault tolerance and abstraction necessary to run the business critical ASPEED ACCELLERATED applications. WMX uses a master-slave paradigm to ensure failed and stalled nodes can be restarted by ACCELLERANT’s fault detection services and to support the adaptive and dynamic load balancing across widely distributed Linux and Windows based clusters such as those found in Grid environments. “ASPEED’s requirements for a high performing, robust message passing technology could not be met by a standard MPI implementation,” said Peter Tyndale, Product Manager of Critical Software’s HPC division. “The most common paradigm for fault tolerance in MPIs is check-pointing but this is expensive in terms of CPU cycles and is inflexible. Our approach with WMX maintains the low latencies and high throughput required while allowing jobs to be dynamically managed ensuring the integrity of business critical applications,” he added. Critical Software’s HPC team can assist ISVs with integrating their applications with WMPI II, as well as providing customised message passing middleware. A free evaluation version of WMPI II can be downloaded directly from the web at www.criticalsoftware.com/HPC . Background: Critical Software of 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 95 engineers between 1998 and 2005, and is dedicated to solutions engineering and product development in several sectors and markets. Critical Software’s HPC business started in 2000, with the release of the entry-level WMPI product, providing an MPI-1.2 implementation for Windows clusters. Critical Software's MPI middleware is used worldwide to power hundreds of compute intensive applications in industry and academia. Continuous investment in R&D has enabled Critical to stay ahead of the competition with WMPI II being the only commercially available MPI-2 implementation for Windows clusters. Linux support has been added to provide a comprehensive solution for parallel processing across COTS clusters.