OSC to host fourth meeting of the MVAPICH Users Group

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Aug 12, 2016) — 

A broad array of system administrators, researchers, engineers and students who share an interest in the MVAPICH open-source library for high performance computing will gather at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) Aug. 15-17 for the fourth meeting of the MVAPICH Users Group (MUG).

The Network-Based Computing Research Group led by Dhabaleswar K. “DK” Panda, Ph.D., a professor of computer science at The Ohio State University, developed and enhances the popular HPC system software package. Panda is a longtime consumer of OSC computing resources and partners closely with the center’s staff on several research projects.

“Dr. Panda’s library is a cornerstone for HPC machines around the world, including OSC’s systems and many of the Top 500,” said Dave Hudak, Ph.D., interim executive director of OSC. “We’ve gained a lot of insight and expertise from partnering with DK and his research group throughout the years.”

The MUG meeting provides an open forum for all attendees (users, system administrators, researchers, engineers, and students) to discuss and share their knowledge on using the MVAPICH2 libraries on HPC clusters (with InfiniBand, Omni-Path, iWARP and RoCE networking technologies) and a diverse set of applications.

The three-day event will include: tutorials from Intel, NVIDIA and Mellanox focusing on their upcoming HPC and ExaScale technologies; keynote talks from the director of Switzerland’s CSCS and a Mellanox vice president; invited talks from many organizations (LLNL, SDSC, PNNL, NVIDIA, University of Michigan, Inspur (China), University of Cambridge (UK), Intel, University of Kyushu (Japan), University of Oregon, Northwestern University), and hands-on sessions from the TAU and MVAPICH teams.

MVAPICH2 is a popular open-source implementation of the MPI-3 standard prevalent on InfiniBand-based systems. 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 architecture favored for its open standards and high performance.

In addition to OSC’s Owens, Ruby and Oakley supercomputers, MVAPICH is powering several of the world’s fastest machines, 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.

This year’s MUG meeting is sponsored by OSC, Mellanox, the National Science Foundation, Paratools and Ohio State. More details of the advance program are available from the following URL: http://mug.mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu/program/. For more information on the meeting (program, registration, travel & stay), please visit http://mug.mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), a member of the Ohio Technology Consortium of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, 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 services 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.