Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
NCSA Releases Beta Version Of VMI
2.0
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) announces the
beta
release of version 2.0 of its Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) software.
VMI is a middleware communication layer that addresses the issues of
availability, usability, and management in the context of large-scale SANs
interconnected over wide-area computational grids. With VMI, users are able to
run applications on distributed clusters that use different types of
interconnects to communicate among processors.
The current release supports Intel's IA-32 platform running the Linux
operating system with support for Intel's Itanium (IA-64) platform planned for
the near future. Future releases will also include data striping across
heterogeneous networks to achieve higher bandwidth than is available from a
single communications interface, and dynamic failover across heterogeneous
networks, a feature that will allow a computation to continue running over any
remaining network interfaces if the primary interface fails.
Features of VMI 2.0 include:
- Support for multiple communication interconnects, including TCP/IP,
Myricom's Myrinet GM, and Mellanox's Infiniband.
- Support for the industry standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallel
computing API, enabling many existing codes to run in a cluster environment
simply by recompiling. MPI support is based on MPICH version 1.2.5 from
Argonne National Laboratory.
- Binary portability of MPI applications across interconnects without
requiring recompilation of application software.
- Remote monitoring and management of the entire VMI middleware layer,
allowing a user to track and modify the performance of the communications
layer while using an application.
Source code is available under a liberal open source-style license that
allows
redistribution in source or binary form provided that copyright notices and
disclaimers remain intact.
The release is available for download from the VMI project Web site at
vmi.ncsa.uiuc.edu/. Access to
documentation, a bug
reporting
tool, and
support mail lists are also available at the site.
NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national
high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge
computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science
Foundation. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the
University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies.
For more information, see www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.
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