Scientific Applications:
Critical ANNOUNCES IMPLEMENTATION
OF GRID CLUSTERS
Critical Software Inc and Coimbra, Portugal, announce the release of WMPI
II, the most comprehensive implementation of version 2 of the MPI standard for
general-purpose grid clusters.
The MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard defines a middleware
abstraction layer that enables the deployment of computing demanding
applications on clusters of workstations in a portable fashion. MPI is
believed to be a critical piece of the forthcoming GRID infrastructures.
The MPI Forum has released version 2 of the MPI standard in 1997, but its
implementation has revealed far from straightforward and only very partial
implementations have been available up to now for general-purpose
clusters.
WMPI II now released by Critical Software is a brand new product,
reengineered from scratch, and the result of almost two years of research and
development by the company. WMPI II is in the high-end of Critical Software's
suite of middleware products for HPC, which already include widely, used WMPI
(based on version 1.2 of the standard) and Patent MPI.
"We have faced tremendous technical challenges in putting the MPI 2
standard into a compliant, stable, efficient, and robust implementation," Joao
Silva, head of product development says. "We have been running WMPI II in-
house for many months in order to tune the highly complex MPI version 2
features supported. Now we are confident to have released an industry strength
implementation of version 2 of the MPI standard for our customers' mission and
business critical applications. WMPI II is an estimated one-year ahead of MPI
version 2 implementation projects from other sources", he adds.
WMPI II includes long awaited standard 2 features such the provision for
dynamic process creation and management, parallel disk I/O, one-sided
communications, and extended collective operations, among many others. The
lack of features such as dynamic process creation in the past have been
claimed to delay the adoption of MPI by existing PVM (Parallel Virtual
Machine) user community, a scenario that should start to change now with the
release of WMPI II.
"The MPI standard 2 features now provided in WMPI II shall open a whole new
range of possibilities for our customers and partners to increase the
efficiency, performance, and reliability of their applications", Mr. Joao
Silva said. "We expect many our existing customers and partners start
migrating soon from WMPI and Patent MPI in search for MPI standard version 2
advanced capabilities, and benefit from our license migration program
advantages," he adds.
Existing products - WMPI and Patent MPI - have achieved high recognition
among the HPC community in the past and are being used by a wealth of
customers in the telecom, defense, aeronautics, finance, automotive, and
energy industries. Companies where Critical Software middleware runs include
Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Landmark Graphics, British Aerospace, Chevron-Texaco,
Hitachi, BP Amoco, among many others.
Critical MPI middleware has been also adopted by a large number of OEM's
and ISV's providing cluster-enabled specific applications for the sectors
above.
Critical Software is providing a trial version of the software. The trial
provides a preview of all WMPI II features, limited to 4 CPU's for 40
days.
The full featured WMPI II supports both TCP-IP and shared memory in
Microsoft Windows platforms, and configurations of over 512 CPU's. The company
also provides a wide range of support, consulting, and training services for
WMPI II.
Finally, the company roadmap includes WMPI II for Linux platforms as well
as cluster configuration support tools, for the 2nd and 3rd quarters of
2003.
About Critical Software
Critical Software Inc, San Jose CA, and Coimbra, Portugal, have been
founded in 1998 to develop dependable solutions and technologies for mission
and business critical systems. Critical headquarters and development center
are located in Portugal where the company has grown from 3 persons in 1998 to
60 engineers in 2002 dedicated to solutions engineering and product
development in several sectors and markets.
Critical Software HPC business started in the year 2000 with the release of
the entry-level WMPI product providing an MPI standard 1 implementation for
Windows grid clusters. The takeover of Patent MPI from Genias Gmbh in 2001
enhanced its offer in the HPC middleware market and enabled the company to
diversify its markets.
The HPC business division of Critical has been growing steadily since then
and is expected to boost with the release of its premium product WMPI II. The
company expects to close 2002 with an increase of 40% in revenues.
http://www.criticalsoftware.com
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