Open MPI team announces iPhone, BlackBerry apps, support for Twitter, and EnergyStar compliance

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The Open MPI team made a splash in the HPC press yesterday (01 April) with a far-reaching announcement that has us looking for ways to buy Open MPI stock

The Open MPI Team, representing a consortium of bailed-out banks, car manufacturers, and insurance companies, is pleased to announce the release of the “unbreakable” / bug-free version Open MPI 2009, (expected to be available by mid-2011). This release is essentially a complete rewrite of Open MPI based on new technologies such as C#, Java, and object-oriented Cobol (so say we all!). Buffer overflows and memory leaks are now things of the past. We strongly recommend that all users upgrade to Windows 7 to fully take advantage of the new powers embedded in Open MPI.

Some highlights of changes in the new version that we anticipate will totally revolutionize the HPC industry

  • Dropped support for MPI 2 in favor of the newly enhanced MPI 11.7 standard. MPI_COOK_DINNER support is only available with additional equipment (some assembly may be required). An experimental PVM-like API has been introduced to deal with the current limitations of the MPI 11.7 API.
  • Added a Twitter network transport capable of achieving peta-scale per second bandwidth (but only on useless data).
  • The iPhone iMPI app (powered by iOpen MPI) is now downloadable from the iTunes Store. Blackberry support will be included in a future release.
  • Add some “green” features for energy savings. The new “–bike” mpirun option will only run your parallel jobs only during the operation hours of the official Open MPI biking team.…Open MPI is therefore EnergyStar compliant when used with these options.

Also in a move that was widely expected, the Open MPI team has dropped support for the rarely used x86 and x86-64 architectures in favor of ARM6.

As a direct result, several Top500 sites are planning to convert from their now obsolete peta-scale machines to high-reliability iPhone clusters using the low-latency AT&T 3G network.

[As a usually legitimate news provider, am I obligated to point out this announcement was made on the first of April? I’m not sure…]