As supercomputers worldwide move towards exascale—the ability to make a quintillion calculations per second—they increasingly incorporate diverse hardware and processing systems. For all of the elements in these systems to operate harmoniously, they must communicate.
UCX is an open source software for high performance computers that allows these hardware systems and architectures to communicate by creating common interface definitions. By defining a common set of features between hardware and programming models, UCX allows developers to bind together libraries, network architectures and custom software and hardware interfaces into one package, essentially channeling the diversity of the world’s HPC applications into one user-friendly research tool.
Released in 2018, UCX is already deployed on supercomputers around the world, including ORNL’s Summit and Sandia National Laboratory’s Astra.
Funding for the project came from the Department of Defense.
The ORNL portion of the development team was initially led by Oscar Hernandez with significant technical contributions from Matthew Baker and Aaron Welch.