Hewlett-Packard Co has announced the first results of a six- months collaborative relationship with the Ohio Supercomputer Center on enhanced message passing software for its Convex Exemplar server line. The two have been working together on new technologies and tools for MPI, the widely adopted message passiing interface for distributed memory computing environments, for use on workstations, networks or parallel computers. The first product resulting from the collaboraration is XMPI, a tool for monitoring and debugging MPI software. Future work in the pipeline covers areas that include the MPI-2 -parallel processing extensions for MPI, multithreaded capabilities, fault-tolerance, parallel input/output and performance tools. Hewlett-Packard needs such tools to encourage its software vendors to continue writing for the Convex architecture, which uses both message passing and a shared memory architecture called Global Shared Memory.

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