Supercomputer Leaders Come Together on New Open Source Framework

The Linux Foundation and a consortium of high-performance computing (HPC) leaders last week announced the creation of the OpenHPC Collaborative Project, which has the goal of creating a new open source framework to support the world's most sophisticated HPC environments. Members of the new consortium include several national laboratories and academic supercomputing facilities, as well as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Lenovo. Currently, 97 percent of the world's fastest supercomputers run Linux. However, as systems become faster and more powerful, a new and dedicated solution for HPC increasingly is warranted. "The use of open source software is central to HPC, but lack of a unified community across key stakeholders...has caused duplication of effort and has increased the barrier to entry," says Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin. "OpenHPC will provide a neutral forum to develop one open source framework that satisfies a diverse set of cluster environment use-cases." The new initiative also is being driven by increased interest in HPC among the private sector as an aid to big data analytics. Analysts note this is especially true in the world of finance, which has significantly increased its supercomputing efforts in recent years.

ZDNet (11/12/15) Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols
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