INDUSTRY

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the first alpha release of version 2.0 of the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) software. VMI is a middleware communication layer that addresses the issues of availability, usability, and management in the context of large-scale SANs interconnected over wide-area computational grids. In effect, VMI makes it possible to run applications on clusters of computers distributed at multiple sites and that use different types of interconnects to communicate among processors. “Grid computing and cluster computing involve heterogeneous systems and no single vendor supplies all the components,” said Rob Pennington, head of NCSA’s computing and data management directorate. “The VMI middleware addresses this reality and at the same time makes the computational scientist’s job easier.” VMI 2.0 is an alpha release intended for developers and early-adopters. Although the software has undergone extensive testing, some bugs are bound to be present and some features may not yet be fully developed. Features of VMI 2.0 include: * Support for multiple communication interconnects including shared memory TCP/IP, Myrinet (GM), and VIA on multi-processor machines. * Support for the industry standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallel computing API. This allows many existing codes to run in a cluster environment simply by recompiling. * Binary portability of MPI applications across interconnects without requiring recompilation of application software. * Dynamic feature configuration, allowing VMI modules for features such as communication interconnect support or profiling to be loaded and unloaded as needed. * Data striping across heterogeneous networks to achieve higher bandwidth than is available from a single communications interface. * Dynamic failover across heterogeneous networks, allowing a computation to continue running over any remaining network interfaces if the primary network interface fails. *Remote monitoring and management of the entire VMI middleware layer, which lets users track and modify the performance of the communications layer while the application is running. Source code is available under a liberal open source-style license that allows redistribution in source or binary form provided that copyright notices and disclaimers remain intact. The release is available for download from the VMI project web page at http://vmi.ncsa.uiuc.edu/. The website also offers documentation, a bug reporting tool, and support mail lists.