INDUSTRY

The Open MPI Project, an alliance of organizations dedicated to providing a high-quality, open source implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), is pleased to announce Cisco Systems, Inc. as its first commercial member. While members of the alliance have traditionally been universities and research institutions, one of the Open MPI Project’s core philosophies centers on engaging the entire high performance computing (HPC) community, including the commercial sector. "Cisco’s membership is a welcome addition, bringing the commercial perspective of the HPC community into the Project," said Andrew Lumsdaine, one of Open MPI’s founding members and director of Indiana University’s Open Systems Lab. Cisco will work within the Open MPI Project to help drive the adoption of Open MPI as an industry standard with other networking and system vendors, with the goal of simplifying application development and supporting wide-spread end-user adoption. The Open MPI software enables scientists and engineers to create applications that can utilize large-scale parallel and distributed computing resources. Open MPI is "network neutral" software that transparently allows applications to run networks built using technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and Infiniband. As one of the leading vendors in HPC, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help independent software vendors and end-users to develop and adopt open standards-based MPI applications. Jeff Squyres, a founding member and core contributor to the Open MPI Project, will be joining Cisco as MPI architect, leading development efforts within Cisco’s new Open MPI development team. Squyres is formerly a senior member of Indiana University’s Open Systems Lab. HPC is both an active field of research and an expanding enterprise market. "Standardizing industry and research efforts on an open source production-quality MPI platform benefits the entire community by allowing researchers to exchange knowledge and experience in a common environment, and then facilitating the incorporation of the results of that research into real-world products," explained Squyres. "This allows independent software vendors, server vendors, and networking vendors to work from a common interface. As a result, customers will be able to rapidly integrate new applications, simplify necessary certifications, and gain choice in network fabric types."