The MPI Forum has released version 2 of the MPI standard in 1997, but its implementation has revealed far from straightforward and only very partial implementations have been available up to now for general-purpose clusters.

WMPI II now released by Critical Software is a brand new product, re-engineered from scratch, and the result of almost two years of research and development by the company. WMPI II is in the high-end of Critical Software's suite of middleware products for HPC, which already include the widely used WMPI, based on version 1.2 of the standard, and Patent MPI.

"We have faced tremendous technical challenges in putting the MPI 2 standard into a compliant, stable, efficient, and robust implementation", Joao Silva, head of product development, stated. "We have been running WMPI II in-house for many months in order to tune the highly complex MPI version 2 features supported. Now we are confident to have released an industry strength implementation of version 2 of the MPI standard for our customers' mission and business critical applications. WMPI II is an estimated one-year ahead of MPI version 2 implementation projects from other sources", he added.

WMPI II includes long awaited standard 2 features such the provision for dynamic process creation and management, parallel disk I/O, one-sided communications, and extended collective operations, among many others. The lack of features such as dynamic process creation in the past have been claimed to delay the adoption of MPI by existing PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) user community, a scenario that should start to change now with the release of WMPI II.

"The MPI standard 2 features now provided in WMPI II shall open a whole new range of possibilities for our customers and partners to increase the efficiency, performance, and reliability of their applications", Mr. Joao Silva stated. "We expect many our existing customers and partners start migrating soon from WMPI and Patent MPI in search for MPI standard version 2 advanced capabilities, and benefit from our license migration programme advantages", he added.

Existing products - WMPI and Patent MPI - have achieved high recognition among the HPC community in the past and are being used by a wealth of customers in the telecom, defense, aeronautics, finance, automotive, and energy industries. Companies where Critical Software middleware runs include Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Landmark Graphics, British Aerospace, Chevron-Texaco, Hitachi, BP Amoco, among many others. Critical MPI middleware has been also adopted by a large number of OEM's and ISV's providing cluster-enabled specific applications for the sectors above.

Critical Software is providing a trial version of the software. The trial provides a preview of all WMPI II features, limited to 4 CPU's for 40 days. The full featured WMPI II supports both TCP-IP and shared memory in Microsoft Windows platforms, and configurations of over 512 CPU's. The company also provides a wide range of support, consulting, and training services for WMPI II. Finally, the company roadmap includes WMPI II for Linux platforms as well as cluster configuration support tools, for the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2003.