FLOSS Weekly recently podcast an interview with Jeff Squyres of OpenMPI. OpenMPI is an open-source implementation of the MPI programming standard. Jeff makes some interesting points on how this has worked out and why it makes, and what MPI is all about. ´
It was interesting to hear some about the development process of OpenMPI and how at this point it makes sense to merge as many back-ends as possible into the unified umbrella of OpenMPI. This builds on the long series of commercial implementations that finally built the critical mass where a shared open-source implementation can slowly take up all the various vendor-specific libraries that exist. With what sounds like almost the same performance.
Leo and Randall, the hosts of the show, were less to the point that in most other podcasts with their questions, showing just how tough the subject of massively parallel scientific computing is even to those fairly well versed in general computing.
Anyway, worth a listen.
Note that OpenMPI is an implementation of MPI, Message-Passing Interface, and is not to be confused with the OpenMP programming standard.
Thanks for mentioning our show. Yeah, I was floundering a bit in how best to bring the topic to the relatively general-knowledge audience, and you could obviously tell.