Departmental News
MVAPICH's Impact on the Speed of Tomorrow
In the November 2007 and again in the June 2008, TOP500.org listed the fastest supercomputers in the world. In each list, the MVAPICH software created by Dr. DK Panda and his team ran one of the top five. In the June list Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), running a 62,976-core Sun Blade System (Ranger) with Opteron Quad Core 2.0 GHz and MVAPICH software, was ranked fourth (4th). Dr. Panda’s creation has impacted the list at this height since November 2003.
Since its inception in 2002, more than 700 organizations world-wide have started using MVAPICH to extract the potential of emerging networking technologies for modern systems such as InfiniBand, iWARP and other RDMA-enabled interconnect networking technologies. MVAPICH, pronounced "em-vah-pich," delivers high performance, scalable and fault-tolerant MPI (Message Passing Interface) for clusters using InfiniBand or 10Gigabit Ethernet/iWARP networking technologies.
This project is supported by funding from U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. DOE Office of Science, Cisco Systems, Intel, Linux Networx, Mellanox, QLogic, and Sun Microsystems; and equipment donations from Advanced Clustering, AMD, Apple, Appro, Chelsio, Dell, Fulcrum Microsystems, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Microway, NetEffect, Obsidian, QLogic and Sun Microsystems. Another technology partner is TotalView Technologies.
According to their web site, the Top500 project "was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as performance measure for ranking the computer systems. The list contains a variety of information including the system specifications and its major application areas."
