INDUSTRY

IDF, San Jose, Scali is announcing plans for making the ScaMPI[tm] MPI library available for the InfiniBand interconnect technology. The implementation will use an intermediate layer conforming to the DAT standard for enabling plug-and-play operation across different interconnects for high performance clustering. The DAT implementation will also enable ScaMPI to run over standard TCP/IP based socket layers on top of legacy interconnects. ISVs will be able to distribute one binary of their application independent of the physical interconnect and reduce their costs for qualification, test, maintenance and support. ScaMPI is Scali´s high performance MPI implementation for Linux* clusters. Unlike most other MPI implementations ScaMPI is thread-safe and thread-hot. This enables any mixture of message passing (using MPI) and shared memory programming (using OpenMP, POSIX threads, or other) inside an SMP machine. The communication between the machines is highly optimized by means of ScaMPI's specially designed collective operations, yielding a magnitude better performance compared to other legacy implementations. ScaMPI has built-in timing and communication trace facilities enabled at runtime by setting a single environment variable making it very user-friendly and versatile for software developers. The availability of a professionally supported high performance MPI for InfiniBand implementations will enable system integrators to provide clusters with a unified high performance interconnect covering everything from high-speed I/O for storage solutions to parallel processing of compute intensive applications in one and the same system. This will greatly enhance total I/O throughput and storage capacity keeping the favorable cost structure of standard high volume servers based on Intel architectures. Scali´s software development for the InfiniBand architecture is done in close cooperation with Intel. Intel is a minority shareholder in Scali through participation in an equity placement closed in June 2002. In addition to ScaMPI, Scali Universe[tm] XE is a comprehensive and integrated cluster management system covering remote monitoring, configurable alarms, out-of-band control of vital system resources, job control, software installation, and facilities for power and console handling in a single system view. The interconnect management and monitoring facilities in Scali Universe will be extended to include InfiniBand implementations. Scalable Linux systems based on Scali software are used for a variety of applications ranging from scientific computing like finite element methods (FEM), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and seismic data processing to commercial applications like scalable databases for data warehousing. "We expect our software products for the InfiniBand architecture to become a natural alternative for professional software developers dealing with parallel applications for clusters. In addition to the ultimate performance and functionality offered by ScaMPI, our ISV support program for independent software vendors is a compelling argument for selecting ScaMPI as the natural choice for their parallel applications" says Einar Rustad, Scali´s VP of Business Development. "MPI support for InfiniBand architecture is critical for HPC deployments." Said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel's Enterprise Platform Group. "We're pleased to work with Scali in their delivery of MPI library support development."