The Linux Foundation announced this week technical, leadership and member investment milestones for OpenHPC, a Linux Foundation project to develop an open source framework for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments.
While HPC is often thought of as a hardware-dominant industry, the software requirements needed to accommodate supercomputing deployments and large-scale modeling requirements is increasingly more demanding.
An open source framework like OpenHPC promises to close technology gaps that hardware enhancements alone can’t address. As open source software has proven its ability to reliably test and maintain operating conditions, it is becoming the de facto software choice for complex environments – meteorology, astronomy, engineering and nuclear physics, and big data science.
OpenHPC is a collaborative, community effort that initiated from a desire to aggregate a number of common ingredients required to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux clusters including provisioning tools, resource management, I/O clients, development tools, and a variety of scientific libraries. Packages provided by OpenHPC have been pre-built with HPC integration in mind with a goal to provide re-usable building blocks for the HPC community.
Over time, the community also plans to identify and develop abstraction interfaces between key components to further enhance modularity and interchangeability.
The community includes representation from a variety of sources including software vendors, equipment manufacturers, research institutions and supercomputing sites. This community works to integrate a multitude of components that are commonly used in HPC systems, and are freely available for open source distribution.
“The OpenHPC community has quickly paved a path of collaborative development that is highly inclusive of stakeholders invested in HPC-optimized software,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “To see OpenHPC members include the world’s leading computing labs, universities, and hardware experts, illustrates how open source unites the world’s leading technologists to share technology investments that will shape the next 30+ years of computing.”
The following organizations have shown their support for the OpenHPC open source framework as founding members of the project, including Altair, Argonne National Laboratory, ARM, Atos, Avtech Scientific, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, CEA, Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (Indiana University), Cineca Consorzio Interuniversitario, Cray, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), Lenovo, Los Alamos National Security (LANS), ParTec Cluster Computing Center, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, RIKEN, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), SGI, SUSE and Univa.
OpenHPC aims to offer a mid-stream building block open source code repository that integrates and tests third-party software available as a distribution. Users can then customize HPC solutions by choosing components based on environment needs. The latest software release, OpenHPC 1.1, is now available for download. This initial software stack includes over 60 packages, including tools and libraries, as well as provisioning and a job scheduler.
Committed to open and transparent collaborative development that is inclusive of cross-industry technical needs, OpenHPC Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and Governing Board members span academic, government labs and hardware organizations. The TSC will oversee technical direction and code contributions for the project while the governing board is responsible for operational efficiency, budgetary oversight, establishing IP policies, and marketing.
