Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface

Message Passing Interface

Message Passing Interface is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers...

 (MPI) library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI

LAM/MPI

LAM/MPI is one of the predecessors of the Open MPI project. Open MPI represents a community-driven, next generation implementation of a Message Passing Interface fundamentally designed upon a component architecture to make an extremely powerful platform for high-performance computing.LAM is an...

, and PACX-MPI). It is used by many TOP500

TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...

 supercomputer

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

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

K computer

The K computer – named for the Japanese word , which stands for 10 quadrillion – is a supercomputer being produced by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. In June 2011, TOP500 ranked K the world's fastest supercomputer, with a rating...

, the fastest supercomputer since June 2011.

Overview

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

• FT-MPI from the University of Tennessee
  University of Tennessee
  The University of Tennessee is a public land-grant university headquartered at Knoxville, Tennessee, United States...
  
  
• LA-MPI from Los Alamos National Laboratory
  Los Alamos National Laboratory
  Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
  
  
• LAM/MPI
  LAM/MPI
  LAM/MPI is one of the predecessors of the Open MPI project. Open MPI represents a community-driven, next generation implementation of a Message Passing Interface fundamentally designed upon a component architecture to make an extremely powerful platform for high-performance computing.LAM is an...
  
   from Indiana University
  Indiana University Bloomington
  Indiana University Bloomington is a public research university located in Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. IU Bloomington is the flagship campus of the Indiana University system. Being the flagship campus, IU Bloomington is often referred to simply as IU or Indiana...
  
  

with contributions from the PACX-MPI team at the University of Stuttgart

University of Stuttgart

The University of Stuttgart is a university located in Stuttgart, Germany. It was founded in 1829 and is organized in 10 faculties....

. These four institutions comprise the founding members of the Open MPI development team.

These MPI implementations were selected because the Open MPI developers thought that they excelled in one or more areas. The stated driving motivation behind Open MPI is to bring the best ideas and technologies from the individual projects and create one world-class open source MPI implementation that excels in all areas. The Open MPI project names several top-level goals:

• Create a free
  Free software
  Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
  
  , open source software, peer-reviewed, production-quality complete MPI-2 implementation.
• Provide extremely high, competitive performance (low latency
  Latency (engineering)
  Latency is a measure of time delay experienced in a system, the precise definition of which depends on the system and the time being measured. Latencies may have different meaning in different contexts.-Packet-switched networks:...
  
   or high bandwidth
  Bandwidth (computing)
  In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
  
  ).
• Directly involve the high-performance computing
  High-performance computing
  High-performance computing uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers.-Overview:...
  
   community with external development and feedback (vendors, 3rd party researchers, users, etc.).
• Provide a stable platform for 3rd party research and commercial development.
• Help prevent the "forking
  Fork (software development)
  In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a legal copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software...
  
   problem" common to other MPI projects.
• Support a wide variety of high-performance computing
  High-performance computing
  High-performance computing uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers.-Overview:...
  
   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

External links

• Open MPI Project Homepage
• RCE01: Open MPI - RCE Podcast interview