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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JULY 14, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 28
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Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
Open Systems Lab Announces The
Release Of LAM/MPI 7.0
Indiana University's Open Systems Lab has released
version 7.0 of its widely-deployed LAM/MPI parallel computing middleware.
LAM/MPI is an open source implementation of the Message Passing Interface
(MPI) standard Ð software that researchers and developers use to enable
clusters and Grid-enabled computers to operate in parallel on a single
problem.
LAM/MPI offers high performance on multiple platforms, including Linux, Sun
Solaris, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX, HP-UX, and Mac OS X, and supports multiple
communication interconnects such as shared memory, Gigabit Ethernet, and
Myrinet.
The most significant change to LAM/MPI for version 7.0 is its new open
component architecture. The new modular design provides a flexible "plug-in"
framework for selecting and changing run-time components and tuning parameters
without the need to recompile user applications.
MPI researchers can also easily extend the MPI implementation itself. "Open
software and -- more importantly, open interfaces -- are essential for
allowing software to be reused, refined, and continually developed by a user
community," said Dr. Andrew Lumsdaine, director of the Open Systems Lab.
"LAM's new open component architecture greatly simplifies the task of
extending LAM's functionality."
Other significant additions to this release are new systems administration
features, which make LAM ideal for use in production environments. "Using
LAM's PBS interface and checkpoint/restart capabilities, system administrators
can have fine-grained control over the scheduling of jobs in their cluster,"
noted Lumsdaine. New support for Globus allows MPI jobs to be executed across
multiple administrative domains using the Grid.
"Resource scheduling is a big part of what systems administrators do every
day," added Jeff Squyres, senior research associate in the Open Systems Lab
and lead developer of LAM/MPI. "The ability to checkpoint and restart parallel
MPI jobs -- even legacy MPI applications -- is a critical feature in terms of
logistical efficiency and fault tolerance."
Developers writing MPI programs will benefit from support for the Etnus
TotalView parallel debugger in LAM/MPI 7.0. "Besides being MPI implementers;
we're also MPI application developers," commented Squyres. "Using TotalView
helps us develop LAM/MPI itself as well as parallel scientific
applications."
To find out more about the new features of LAM/MPI 7.0, or to download the
software, visit: www.lam-mpi.org/.
About the Open Systems Lab
The Open Systems Lab (OSL) is one of the Pervasive Technology Labs at
Indiana
University (www.ptl.iu.edu). As
part
of its mission to
support
pervasive computing, the OSL conducts research on fundamental technologies to
enable productive and efficient computing with large-scale hardware and
software systems. Advocating open standardized interfaces for scalability, the
lab has ongoing projects in languages, libraries, tools, middleware, and
applications.
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