ABSTRACT: MPI implementations are a mixture of many scientific, engineering, and
end-user requirements including: message-passing's ever-growing need
for lower latency and higher bandwidth, the delicate balance between
MPI and application resource consumption, the non-portable adaptations
necessary for specific platforms and environments, the rise of
usability and tool-oriented features, ...and so on. Software
platforms that can fullfill all of these requirements are complicated
-- it takes an active community to both maintain and continue to
develop a portable MPI implementation such as Open MPI.
While the petaflop barrier was broken just two years ago, innovation
continues in the form of new end-user features, new hardware
platforms, MPI-2.2 and MPI-3.0 functionality, and the long road
towards an exaflop. As we've stated previously, we believe that a
diverse, open source team representing many different backgrounds,
philosophies, and biases (from both industry and academia) is uniquely
equipped to meet the challenges of providing a production-quality MPI
implementation that is capable of supporting world-class, cutting-edge
research.
Indeed, advancing the state of computing is not only about the MPI
API; MPI implementations tend to be the "public face" of many
different pieces of technology. For example, the Open MPI project has
spawned multiple sub-projects towards extending the state of the art
in parallel computing. One such project is Hardware Locality (hwloc),
spearheaded by INRIA; a standalone library that provides platform
topology information.
In this year's BOF, we would like to hear (more) from the audience:
1. What do you like / dislike about Open MPI?
2. What feature(s) do you want to see in Open MPI?
3. What new environments will be using MPI in your organization?
4. How can you contribute to the Open MPI project?
Come hear where Open MPI is going, and how you can (and should!) join
our efforts.
Session Leader Details:
Jeff Squyres (Primary Session Leader) - Cisco Systems
George Bosilca (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Tennessee, Knoxville
