The Linux Foundation announces OpenHPC Collaborative Project

In the past two weeks, I had the opportunity to  interview two different companies who were open sourcing their project or starting up something new and when I asked if they were planning to work with any open source organization, the answer was ‘probably the Linux Foundation’.

In an interview with ITWorld the head honcho of the foundation, Jim Zemlin, shared his vision of growing the foundation beyond Linuxand they just announced the OpenHPC Collaborative Project. The project aims to provide a new, open source framework to support the world’s most sophisticated high performance computing (HPC) environments.

SUSE seems to be the only software vendor from among the trinity – Red Hat, Canonical and SUSE – to be part of this project. Other industry leaders supporting the project include Allinea Software, Altair, ANSYS, Argonne, Atos, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, The Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies at Indiana University, Cray, Dell, Fujitsu Systems Europe, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Leibniz Supercomputing Center, Lenovo, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MSC Software, NEC, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Sandia National Laboratories, SENAI CIMATEC and Texas Advanced Computing Center.

OpenHPC members plan to work together to:

• Create a stable environment for testing and validation. The community will benefit from a shared, continuous integration environment, which will feature a build environment and source control; bug tracking; user and developer forums; collaboration tools; and a validation environment.
• Reduce costs. By providing an open source framework for HPC environments, the overall expense of implementing and operating HPC installations will be reduced.
• Provide a robust and diverse open source software stack. OpenHPC members will work together on the stability of the software stack, allowing for ongoing testing and validation across a diverse range of use cases.
• Develop a flexible framework for configuration: The OpenHPC stack will provide a group of stable and compatible software components that are continually tested for optimal performance. Developers and end users will be able to use any or all of these components depending on their performance needs, and may substitute their own preferred components to fit their own use cases.

“The use of open source software is central to HPC, but lack of a unified community across key stakeholders – academic institutions, workload management companies, software vendors, computing leaders – has caused duplication of effort and has increased the barrier to entry,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “OpenHPC will provide a neutral forum to develop one open source framework that satisfies a diverse set of cluster environment use-cases.”