Fujitsu Launches Initiative to Develop Mathematical Library for Petascale Computing Applications

By DE Editors

Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe have announced the launch of the Open Petascale Libraries (OPL) project, a global collaboration initiative to develop a mathematical library that will serve as a development platform for applications running on petascale-class supercomputers.

Initially involving 10 partners, including universities and research institutions, the project will make the developed code publicly available in open-source form, thereby contributing to the computational science community as a whole. In addition, the output from the OPL project will be applied to help accelerate the application development for a next-generation supercomputer (the “K computer”), which is scheduled to begin operation in fiscal 2012. 

“The OPL project is an important step in the right direction,” says Professor Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. “Open software initiatives like this succeed at developing high-quality, standardised software and building new partnerships. Fujitsu’s initiatives should be recognised as a significant advancement in the development process of petascale software and, more importantly, in collaborative communities to facilitate this development.”

The aim of the OPL project is to develop a mathematical library that will play an important role in each of the representative application areas for petascale supercomputers. Target systems for the library are the Next-Generation Supercomputer and x86 HPC clusters, which are standard systems used as supercomputers. The library’s parallelization will adopt a hybrid parallel programming model, which is said to be effective for today’s multi-core supercomputers. By using the code generated through this project, it will be possible for application developers to maximize the performance of petascale supercomputers, according to Fujitsu.

The launch of the OPL project is scheduled to coincide with SC10, a conference bringing together supercomputer professionals from around the world, with the project’s inaugural workshop to be held on Nov. 14 in New Orleans.

For more information, visit Fujitsu.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.