HPC

Blog post

Tree-based launch in Open MPI

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 […]

Blog post

libfabric support of usNIC in Open MPI

I’ve previously written about libfabric.  Here’s some highlights: libfabric is a set of next-generation, community-driven, ultra-low latency networking APIs The APIs are not tied to any particular networking hardware model Cisco is actively helping define, design, and develop the libfabric APIs as part of the community My fellow team member Reese Faucette recently contributed a […]

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Top 5 Reasons the HPC Community Should Care About libfabric

I’ve mentioned libfabric on this blog a few times: it’s a set of next-generation APIs that allow direct access to networking hardware (e.g., high-speed / low latency NICs) from Linux userspace (kernel access is in the works). To give you a little perspective: the libfabric APIs are aimed at a lower layer than MPI.  libfabric […]

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“Using Advanced MPI” book (i.e., MPI-3 for the rest of us)

I’m stealing this text directly from Torsten Hoefler‘s blog, because I think it’s directly relevant to many of this blog’s readers: Our book on “Using Advanced MPI” will appear in about a month — now it’s the time to pre-order on Amazon at a reduced price. It is released by the prestigious MIT Press, a must […]

Blog post

The “vader” shared memory transport in Open MPI: Now featuring 3 flavors of…

Today’s blog post is by Nathan Hjelm, a Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a core developer on the Open MPI project. The latest version of the “vader” shared memory Byte Transport Layer (BTL) in the upcoming Open MPI v1.8.4 release is bringing better small message latency and improved support for “zero-copy” transfers. NOTE: “zero copy” […]