High Performance Computing Networking

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 […]

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 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 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.

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 […]

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?

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.

Linux containers, as a lighter virtualization alternative to virtual machines, are gaining momentum. The High Performance Computing (HPC) community is eyeing Linux containers with interest, hoping that they can provide the isolation and configurability of Virtual Machines, but without the performance penalties. In this article, I will show a simple example of libvirt-based container configuration […]

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 […]