HPC News Bytes 20230828: Gartner on Composable; An ABI for MPI; AMD Acquires Mipsology; Google Cloud HPC Clone

A happy Monday morn to you. This week’s HPC News Bytes offers a quick (4:53) run-through of the major news in our sector over the past week. This morning we look at: Gartner predicts accelerated growth for composable computing; Proposed ABI (application binary interface) for MPI to simplify parallel apps; AMD buys AI software company Mipsology – a sign of more AI M&A activity to come?; HPC clone on Google Cloud Platform

Exascale Computing Project Brings Hardware-Accelerated Optimizations to MPICH Library

The MPICH library is one of the most popular implementations of MPI.[i] Primarily developed at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) with contributions from external collaborators, MPICH has adhered to the idea of delivering a high-performance MPI library by working closely with vendors in which the MPICH software provides the link between the MPI interface used by applications programmers and vendors who provide low-level hardware acceleration for their network devices. Yanfei Guo (Figure 1), the principal investigator (PI) of the Exascale MPI project in the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and assistant computer scientist at ANL, is following this tradition. According to Guo, “The ECP MPICH team is working closely with vendors to add general optimizations—optimizations that will work in all situations—to speed MPICH and leverage the capabilities of accelerators, such as GPUs.”

Internode Programming With MPI and Intel Xeon Phi Processor

“While MPI was originally developed for general purpose CPUs and is widely used in the HPC space in this capacity, MPI applications can also be developed and then deployed with the Intel Xeon Phi Processor. With the understanding of the algorithms that are used for a specific application, tremendous performance can be achieved by using a combination of OpenMP and MPI.”