Software developed at Ohio State powering world's fastest computer

At the recent Supercomputing ’16 Conference, it was revealed that the MVAPICH software, created by Computer Science and Engineering Professor DK Panda and his team, is powering the world's fastest computer. This Sunway TaihuLight at China's National Supercomputing Center is a 10,649,600-core with a peak performance at 125.4 petaflops, which translates to 125 quadrillion calculations per second. The system is used for various research and engineering work, in areas such as climate, weather and earth systems modeling, life science research, advanced manufacturing and data analytics.

MVAPICH (Message Passing Interface for InfiniBand), pronounced "em-vah-pich," celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. The software improves processing by connecting traditional supercomputing software with innovative networking technologies and protocols, thus increasing the data flow speed in a significant manner. It delivers the best performance, scalability and fault tolerance for high-end computing systems and servers using InfiniBand, Omni-Path, Ethernet/iWARP, and RoCE networking technologies. This software is being used by more than 2,675 organizations in 83 countries worldwide to extract the potential of these emerging networking technologies for modern systems. As of November 2016, more than 402,000 downloads have been logged on the project's site. This software is also being distributed by many vendors as part of their software distributions.

Prof. Panda and members of the NOWLAB are vital to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering's research efforts. Over the years, members have won multiple awards and best paper recognitions at many conferences, including recently at SC16.

Supercomputer power rankings are updated regularly by The TOP500.