Star-P 2.6 Boosts Parallel Computing Platform Support

By DE Editors

Interactive Supercomputing (ISC; Waltham, MA) announced a new version of its Star-P parallel application development platform, which includes code optimization tools for faster application performance; expanded Python support; parallel platform ease-of-use tools; and more workload manager support.

Star-P 2.6 is a parallel application development platform that lets scientists, engineers, and analysts create algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical tools — such as MATLAB, Python and R — and then run them instantly and interactively on parallel computers with little to no modification. Star-P eliminates the need to re-program applications in C, Fortran, or MPI in order to run on parallel systems, resulting in huge productivity gains.

Star-P 2.6 features a preview version of an R language client, expanding its support for Very High Level Languages (VHLL) beyond MATLAB and Python. It extends its support for Python, adding more than 70 new parallel computing functions to its collection of Python mathematical libraries. It expands its support for popular cluster workload managers, now integrating with Sun Microsystems’s Sun Grid Engine as well as PBSpro. The new version also includes a Star-P desktop client for Microsoft Vista, in addition to Linux and Windows XP.

To boost performance from 20 to 100 percent, the release states, Star-P 2.6 now has the ability to dynamically load mathematical libraries that are optimized for a specific computing platform. Plus, new performance profiling tools are for optimizing application performance on parallel systems. A PPBench tool allows users to diagnose performance problems stemming from hardware and network issues.

Go to Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) for further details.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.