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Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

Dr. Jeff Squyres is Cisco's representative to the MPI Forum standards body and is Cisco's core software developer in the open source Open MPI project. He has worked in the High Performance Computing (HPC) field since his early graduate-student days in the mid-1990's, and is a chapter author of the MPI-2 and MPI-3 standards.

Jeff received both a BS in Computer Engineering and a BA in English Literature from the University of Notre Dame in 1994; he received a MS in Computer Science and Engineering from Notre Dame two years later in 1996. After some active duty tours in the military, Jeff received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Notre Dame in 2004. Jeff then worked as a Post-Doctoral research associate at Indiana University, until he joined Cisco in 2006.

In Cisco, Jeff is part of the VIC group (Virtual Interface Card, Cisco's virtualized server NIC) in the larger UCS server group. He works in designing and writing systems-level software for optimized network IO in HPC and other high-performance types of applications. Jeff also represents Cisco to several open source software communities and the MPI Forum standards body.

Articles

MPI outside of C and Fortran (part 2)

2 min read

In my previous blog entry, I answered a user question about how MPI defines its global constants, specifically in the context of interactions with other languages. I went beyond that answer, and also explained why MPI does not define an ABI. In this entry, I’ll go into the “how does MPI interact with other languages?” part […]

MPI outside of C and Fortran

4 min read

Recently, a reader asked me about how MPI defines its global constants. More specifically, the user was asking how MPI defines its interactions with languages other than C and Fortran (i.e., the two officially-supported language bindings). This is a good question, and has implications on both the MPI standards documents and various MPI implementations.  Let’s dive […]

EuroMPI 2015 Call for participation

1 min read

EuroMPI 2015 is presented in cooperation with ACM and SIGHPC in Bordeaux France, 21st – 23rd September, 2015. EuroMPI is the prime annual meeting for researchers, developers, and students in message-passing parallel computing with MPI and related paradigms. Deadline of early registration is Sept 1st, 2015

Open MPI new versioning scheme and roadmap

1 min read

Open MPI recently updated its version numbering scheme and development roadmap. This new scheme aims to provide more semantic information in the Open MPI “A.B.C” version number to both end users and system administrators.

MPI-3.1: It’s official!

1 min read

Woo hoo! MPI 3.1 votes: aside from one organization who had the leave before the final vote, the MPI Forum unanimously voted to approve MPI-3.1. Get your fresh, hot copy of the MPI-3.1 specification (I’m told that physical books will become available in the coming months for those who are interested — can you guess […]

MPI newbie: What is “operating system bypass”?

3 min read

The term “operating system bypass” (or “OS bypass”) is typically tossed around in MPI and HPC conversations; it’s generally something that is considered a “must have” in order to get good performance with many MPI applications. But what is it?  And if it’s good for performance, why don’t all applications use OS bypass?

That Jonathan Dursi blog entry

2 min read

Jonathan Dursi recently posted a fairly controversial blog entry entitled “HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it.” Some people immediately dismissed the blog post (and its followups) as trolling.  Others praised Jonathan for bringing up the issues. Brock Palen and I recently chatted with Jonathan about this blog entry on RCE-Cast.

A supercomputer in your browser

1 min read

Cisco is pleased to announce the “Supercomputer in your browser” (SiYB) project, designed to bring the rich High Performance Computing (HPC) ecosystem to the world’s most popular software: web browsers. The free SiYB software is a web browser plugin that is easily installed on any desktop or laptop computer running Windows, OS X, or Linux. “I’ve […]

Euro MPI 2015 CFP (now featuring 100% more Europe)

1 min read

Euro MPI 2015 has returned to Europe!  (recall that Euro MPI/Asia 2014 was in beautiful Kyoto, Japan) Euro MPI 2015 will be September 21-24 in Bordeaux, France. That means that it’s that time of year again: get your papers ready for submission!  The CFP was just recently published:

The state of libfabric in Open MPI

1 min read

Yesterday morning, I gave a presentation at the 2015 OpenFabrics Software Developers’ Workshop.  I discussed the status of libfabric support in Open MPI. Here’s a copy of my slides:

Cisco usNIC libfabric provider presentation

1 min read

Earlier this morning, I gave a presentation at the 2015 OpenFabrics Software Developers’ Workshop.  I discussed Cisco’s experiences with writing providers for both the Linux Verbs API and the Libfabric API. Here’s a copy of my slides:

MPI-3.1! …not quite yet

1 min read

The MPI Forum met for our quarterly meeting last week in Portland, Oregon. The main goal of the meeting was to pass the MPI-3.1 standard into law.  MPI-3.1 contains a bunch of errata from MPI-3.0, and a small number of new things.

A Farewell to LAM/MPI

1 min read

With a little sadness, I note that LAM/MPI was officially retired recently. LAM/MPI’s hosting provider, Indiana University, made the decision not to renew the lam-mpi.org domain any more.  As of a few weeks ago, LAM/MPI’s web site is no more, and its domain is in the process of expiring. LAM/MPI was a highly popular implementation […]

Open MPI: behind the scenes

2 min read

Working on an MPI implementation isn’t always sexy.  There’s a lot of grubby, grubby work that needs to happen on a continual basis to produce a production-quality MPI implementation that can be used for real-world HPC applications. Sure, we always need to work on optimizing short message latency. Sure, we need to keep driving MPI’s […]

MPI 3.1: coming soon to an implementation near you

1 min read

The next MPI Forum meeting will be in Portland, OR, USA, in early March. One of the major topics on the agenda will be voting on the MPI 3.1 standard. You might be wondering what’s new in MPI-3.1. I’m glad you asked.

Tree-based launch in Open MPI (part 2)

2 min read

In my prior blog entry, I described the basics of Open MPI’s tree-based launching system over ssh (yes, there are still some valid / good reasons for using ssh over a native job scheduler / resource manager’s parallel launch mechanisms…). That entry got a little long, so I split the rest of the discussion into […]

Tree-based launch in Open MPI

2 min read

I’ve mentioned it before: the run-time systems of MPI implementations are frequently unsung heroes. A lot of blood, sweat, tears, and innovation goes into parallel run time systems, particularly those that can scale to very large systems.  But they’re  not discussed often, mainly because they’re not as sexy and ultra-low latency numbers, or other popular […]

Holiday wishes

1 min read

As usual, in the post-Supercomputing / post-US-Thanksgiving-holiday lull, the work that we have all put off since we started ignoring it to prepare for Supercomputing catches up to us.  Inevitably, it means that my writing here at the blog falls behind in December.  Sorry, folks! To make up for that, here’s a little ditty I […]