Greetings Open MPI users; we thought you'd be interested in the following announcement...
A new supercomputer, powered by Open MPI, has broken the petaflop barrier to become the world's fastest supercomputer. The "Roadrunner" system was jointly developed by Los Alamos National Laboratories and IBM. Roadrunner's design uses a cluster of AMD dual-core processors coupled with computational accelerators based on the IBM Cell Broadband Engine. The cluster consists of 3,060 nodes, each of which has 2 dual-core AMD processors and associated Cell accelerators. The AMD nodes are connected with 4x DDR InfiniBand links. Open MPI was used as the communications library for the 12,240 processes comprising the Linpack run which broke the Petaflop barrier at 1.026 Petaflop/s. The version of Open MPI used in the run-for-record was a pre-release version of the upcoming 1.3 release. Enhancements in this release include modifications for efficient, scalable process launch. As such, Open MPI was run unmodified from a snapshot of the pre-1.3 source base (meaning: there are no Roadrunner-specific enhancements that are unportable to other environments -- all Open MPI users benefit from the scalability and performance improvements contributed by the Roadrunner project). --Brad Benton Open MPI/Roadrunner Team
