GOVERNMENT

High bandwidth, low latency HPC clusters are now a reality for Windows users with the showcasing at the SuperComputing 2004 conference of WMPI II running on Infinicon System’s high-speed Infiniband based network fabric. WMPI II is a full implementation of the MPI-2 message passing standard allowing compute intensive algorithms to be run in parallel over low-cost COTS clusters. “Most Windows cluster users are running with Fast or Gigabit Ethernet interconnects, which can give good results on small clusters but are not really scalable,” stated Peter Tyndale, Business Development Manager for Critical Software. “With WMPI II supporting the InfiniCon fabric we are aiming to give users bandwidths of up to 10 Gbps with latencies of less than 10μs scalable to thousands of nodes. This will prove particularly beneficial to applications which become latency bound as the number of parallel processes increases such as in CFD and FEA simulations,” he added. Critical Software has worked closely with InfiniCon who have provided technical and hardware support for this latest enhancement to WMPI II. “By bringing the benefits of InfiniBand to the Windows-based high performance computing market, we allow customers to experience greater levels of application performance,” says InfiniCon CEO Russ Hawkins. “Our groundbreaking solutions have been proven to meet the demands of high performance business computing environments, exceeding the performance of traditional networking technologies.” 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. 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 provides a trial version of WMPI II on its web site at www.criticalsoftware.com/HPC. The trial version provides a preview of all features, limited to 4 CPU’s for 40 days. The company also provides a wide range of support, consulting, and training services for WMPI II. Finally, the company roadmap includes supporting InfiniCon networking solutions on Linux clusters along with improved fault tolerance.