Date: 15/11/2010

Code for supercomputer software on public domain by Fujitsu

Fujitsu has announced launch of 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 supercomputer systems. The ten partners, including universities and research institutions are: the Society of Scientific Systems (Japan), The Australian National University (Australia), Imperial College London (UK), The Innovative Computing Laboratory at The University of Tennessee (US), The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) (UK), Oxford University e-Research Centre (UK), The Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK), University College London (UK), Fujitsu Limited, and Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe Limited. RIKEN (Japan) and The National Institute of Informatics (NII) (Japan) are expected to join in the near future.

OPL project will make the developed code publicly available in open-source form for supercomputer software developers. Supercomputing is more required in life sciences, development of new materials and sources of energy, disaster prevention and mitigation, manufacturing technologies and basic research into the origins of matter and the universe.

Fujitsu says 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 parallelisation will adopt a hybrid parallel programming model, which is 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, adds Fujitsu.