The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) hosted the first meeting of the MVAPICH Users Group, a broad array of users, system administrators, researchers, engineers and students who share an interest in the MVAPICH open-source library of communications standards used internally by many high performance computing (HPC) systems.
The event, held Aug. 26-27 at OSC’s BALE Theater, was organized by Dhabaleswar K. “DK” Panda, Ph.D., a professor of computer science at The Ohio State University. Panda is a longtime user of OSC HPC resources and a partner with the center on several research projects.
Panda’s Network-Based Computing Research Group developed and enhances the popular HPC system software package. The two-day event included talks from experts in the field, presentations from the MVAPICH2 team on tuning and optimization strategies for various components, trouble-shooting guidelines, contributed presentations, an open-microphone session and an interactive/hands-on session with the MVAPICH2 developers.
Message Passing Interface (MPI), the lingua franca of scientific parallel computing, is a standard for the communications library that a parallel application uses to share data among tasks and is available on a variety of parallel computer platforms. On the hardware side, InfiniBand is a widely used processor interconnect favored for its open standards and high performance.
MVAPICH2 is a popular implementation of the MPI-3 standard prevalent on InfiniBand-based systems. In addition to OSC’s HP-Intel Oakley Cluster and IBM 1350 Glenn Cluster, Panda’s communications library is powering several of the world’s fastest supercomputers, including the Stampede system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin; the Pleiades array at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames Research Center near Mountain View, Calif.; and Tsubame 2.0 cluster at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at the at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
The MVAPICH Users Group event is sponsored by OSC, Mellanox Technologies, Advanced Clustering Technologies and The Ohio State University.
The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), a member of the Ohio Technology Consortium of the Ohio Board of Regents, addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the vital resources essential to make extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy, and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required to secure 21st century jobs. For more, visit www.osc.edu.
The Network-Based Computing Research Group at The Ohio State University is led by Dr. Dhabaleswar K. Panda and investigates modern networking technologies, including InfiniBand and 10GE/iWARP. The group is currently collaborating with National Laboratories and leading InfiniBand and 10GE/iWARP companies on designing various subsystems of next generation high-end systems. For more, visit nowlab.cse.ohio-state.edu.
