Project Description

The OMPI-X project ensures that the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard, and its specific implementation in Open MPI meet the needs of the ECP community in terms of performance, scalability, and capabilities or features.

MPI is the predominant interface for inter-process communication in high-end computing. Nearly all of the ECP application (AD) projects and the majority of software technology (ST) projects rely on it. Since its inception, the MPI standard has evolved to address the changing needs of massively parallel libraries and applications as well as the systems on which they are run. With the impending exascale era, the pace of change and growing diversity of HPC architectures pose new challenges that the MPI standard must address. The OMPI-X project is active in the MPI Forum standards organization, and works within it to raise and resolve key issues facing ECP applications and libraries.

Open MPI is an open source, community-based implementation of the MPI standard that is freely available, and used by a number of prominent HPC vendors as the basis for their commercial MPI offerings. The OMPI-X team is comprised of active members of the Open MPI community, with an extensive history of contributions to the development and maintence of the library. The OMPI-X project is focusing on prototyping and demonstrating exascale-relevant proposals under consideration by the MPI Forum, as well as improving the fundamental performance and scalability of Open MPI, particularly for exascale-relevant platforms and job sizes. MPI users will be able to take advantage of these enhancements simply by linking against recent builds of the Open MPI library.

The OMPI-X project is led by David Bernholdt (ORNL) and includes participation from LANL, LLNL, ORNL, SNL, and U. Tennessee.