Wednesday October 11, 2006

Early Access for Cluster Tools 7 has started and the bits are here. This is the first version of CT to include an MPI library based on Open MPI. As mentioned previously, we are in the midst of a transition from our old, proprietary implementation of MPI to an open source based model in which we contribute our resources and expertise to the Open MPI effort to leverage innovation and expertise outside of Sun. During this transition, we are willing to take some steps backwards in functionality in order to get to a better and stronger MPI position in the longer term. One such example is Open MPI's lack of robust thread safety, a feature which our proprietary library implemented very effectively. We'll get there, but it isn't the highest priority feature.

The big news is that this first EA drop includes an initial implementation of uDAPL support to enable MPI to be used with Infiniband on Solaris. This first version uses send/recv semantics, with a plan to continue improving uDAPL support over the course of the Early Access program.

Remember that Early Access is more like an alpha release than a beta release: our intent is to share the early bits with you as soon as possible to allow for early experimentation and testing. If you are a Sun field person involved with HPC or a Sun customer interested in MPI, it would be great if you would put this EA release through its paces so we can identify problems you care about as early as possible.

Congratulations to the Sun ClusterTools engineering team and to the Open MPI community for getting to this milestone. Much work has gone into improving the quality and robustness of the code base, on integrating Open MPI with Sun Grid Engine, and on adding support for Infiniband on Solaris. There is a lot more work to do, but this is a great start.