Dr. Ralph H. Castain is a Principal Engineer at Intel
The Process Management Interface (PMI) has been used for quite some time as a means of exchanging wireup information needed for interprocess communication. Two versions (PMI-1 and PMI-2) have been released as part of the MPICH effort. While PMI-2 demonstrates better scaling properties than its PMI-1 predecessor, attaining rapid launch and wireup of the roughly 1M processes executing across 100k nodes expected for exascale operations remains challenging.
Dr. Ralph H. Castain is a Principal Engineer at Intel, where he focuses on the development of control system technologies for exascale computing systems. Dr. Castain received his B.S. degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College and multiple graduate level degrees (M.S. in solid-state physics, M.S.E.E. degree in robotics, and Ph.D. in nuclear physics) from Purdue University. He has served in government, academia, and industry for over 30 years as a contributing scientist and business leader in fields ranging from HPC to nuclear physics, particle accelerator design, remote sensing, autonomous pattern recognition, and decision analysis. He currently is the founder and leader of the PMIx community.
