Linux Foundation Launches Open Source HPC Group

The Linux Foundation, along with industry and academic partners, plans to drive innovation in open source high-performance computing through a new collaborative project, OpenHPC.

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the Linux kernel and other open source projects, has partnered with Dell, HP Enterprise, Intel, Fujitsu Systems Europe and a number of university research labs to create the OpenHPC project. The collaboration will center on four main goals:

Producing a stable environment for testing HPC software

Creating an open source framework for HPC environments that will reduce costs

Developing a sophisticated HPC software stack suited to a variety of applications

Building a configuration framework that offers developers and users flexibility to tailor HPC software to meet their needs.

The time is right for new investment in open source HPC software because such software is vital in fields like meteorology, astronomy, engineering and nuclear physics, yet it has not been developed in a central, efficient way, according to the Linux Foundation.

“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.”