Section: Software
Open-MX
Participants : Nathalie Furmento, Brice Goglin, Ludovic Stordeur.
The Open-MX software stack is a high-performance message passing implementation for any generic Ethernet interface. It was developed within our collaboration with Myricom, Inc. as a part of the move towards the convergence between high-speed interconnects and generic networks. Open-MX exposes the raw Ethernet performance at the application level through a pure message passing protocol.
While the goal is similar to the old GAMMA stack [50] or the recent iWarp [49] implementations, Open-MX relies on generic hardware and drivers and has been designed for message passing. Open-MX is also wire-compatible with Myricom MX protocol and interface so that any application built for MX may run on any machine without Myricom hardware and talk other nodes running with or without the native MX stack. Open-MX is under experimentation at the Argonne National Laboratory as a networking layer for the PVFS2 parallel file-system on the upcoming BlueGene/P machine in the Argonne laboratory (ANL's BlueGene/P system is ranked #7 in the June 2009 Top500, with 450 Tflop/s). It will connect BlueGene specific nodes with generic 10 gigabit/s Ethernet boards to generic I/O nodes with Myri-10G running in native MX mode.
Open-MX offers efficient data movement abilities thanks to copy offload abilities of modern hardware [8] . It also implements advanced memory management mechanisms to hide the usual overhead of memory pinning for both intra-node and inter-node communications [33] , [32] . Open-MX is also an interesting framework for studying next-generation hardware features that could help Ethernet hardware become legacy in the context of high-performance computing. Some innovative message-passing-aware stateless abilities, such as multiqueue binding and interrupt coalescing, were designed and evaluated thanks to Open-MX [34] , [20] , [30] .
Brice Goglin , Nathalie Furmento and Ludovic Stordeur are the main contributors to Open-MX . The software is already composed of more than 37 000 lines of code in the Linux kernel and in user-space. It is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 at the following URL: http://open-mx.org/ .
