Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface (MPI)

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI, and PACX-MPI). It is used by many

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinci ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s including

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, which was the world's fastest supercomputer from June 2008 to November 2009, and

K computer The K computer named for the Japanese word/numeral , meaning 10 quadrillion (1016)See Japanese numbers was a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Pre ...

, the fastest supercomputer from June 2011 to June 2012.

Overview

Open MPI represents the merger between three well-known MPI implementations: * FT-MPI from the

University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee (officially The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; or UT Knoxville; UTK; or UT) is a public land-grant research university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Founded in 1794, two years before Tennessee became the 16th state, ...

* LA-MPI from

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in ...

* LAM/MPI from

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universit ...

with contributions from the PACX-MPI team at the

University of Stuttgart The University of Stuttgart (german: Universität Stuttgart) is a leading research university located in Stuttgart, Germany. It was founded in 1829 and is organized into 10 faculties. It is one of the oldest technical universities in Germany wit ...

. These four institutions comprise the founding members of the Open MPI development team. The Open MPI developers selected these MPI implementations as excelling in one or more areas. Open MPI aims to use the best ideas and technologies from the individual projects and create one world-class

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

MPI implementation that excels in all areas. The Open MPI project specifies several top-level goals: * to create a

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

, peer-reviewed, production-quality complete MPI-3.0 implementation * to provide extremely high, competitive performance (low latency or high

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

) * to involve the

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multid ...

community directly with external development and feedback (vendors, 3rd party researchers, users, etc.) * to provide a stable platform for 3rd-party research and commercial development * to help prevent the " forking problem" common to other MPI projects * to support a wide variety of

platforms and environments

Code modules

The Open MPI code has 3 major code modules: * OMPI - MPI code * ORTE - the Open Run-Time Environment * OPAL - the Open Portable Access Layer

Commercial implementations

* Sun HPC Cluster Tools - beginning with version 7, Sun switched to Open MPI * Bullx MPI—In 2010

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announced the release of bullx MPI, based on Open MPI

Consortium

Open MPI development is performed within a consortium of many industrial and academic partners. The consortium also covers several other software projects such as the hwloc (Hardware Locality) library which takes care of discovering and modeling the topology of parallel platforms.

References

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External links