The OpenHPC Collaborative Project Sets Sights on Supercomputing

Many people are familiar with the impact that The Linux Foundation has had on the Linux community itself, as well as several notable open source projects. Now, the company is setting its sights on the high performance computing environment. 

Through the new OpenHPC Collaborative Project, it will provide a new, open source framework to support very sophisticated High Performance Computing environments.

The foundation has gathered partners to support the effort. The long list of partners ranges from the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies at Indiana University, Cray to Cray and Lawrence Livermore Labs.

Supercomputers and high performance computers play vital roles in everything from drug discovery to astronomical modeling. With unique application demands and parallel runtime requirements, software remains one of the biggest challenges for HPC user adoption. ( The foundation cites the IDC report Worldwide HPC Server 2015–2019 Forecast). " Open source and Linux-based software components have become a standard way to reliably test and maintain stable operating conditions while providing a cost-effective means for scaling with data growth," reports the announcement, which adds:

"OpenHPC will provide a new, open source framework for HPC environments. This will consist of upstream project components, tools, and interconnections to enable the software stack. The community will provide an integrated and validated collection of HPC components that can be used to provide a full-featured reference HPC software stack available to developers, system administrators and users. OpenHPC will provide flexibility for multiple configurations and scalability to meet a wide variety of user needs."

 “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 an open source framework that satisfies a diverse set of cluster environment use-cases.”

The Linux Foundation and partners will work on development tasks as well as validation for high performance computing components. For more information about OpenHPC or to become a member, you can visit www.openhpc.community.