Open Systems Lab researchers have made a major contribution to the most current version of a critical standard for the Open MPI software used to power modern supercomputers. 

Open MPI is widely considered the world’s best software for enabling the thousands of processors in modern supercomputers to work together to solve massive computational problems. MPI is a standard that specifies how different processors can coordinate actions and share data and defines the most critical tools in existence for programming supercomputers. The Open Systems Lab is a leading contributor to the Open MPI implementation of the MPI standard. The Open MPI project is a leading production-quality, open-source implementation at the forefront of research innovation, high performance and high quality development in the HPC community.

Participation in the MPI Forum, the standard-setting organization for Open MPI, is an activity of international importance in the supercomputing community. During 2008, experienced researchers from the OSL participated in the standardization effort of the upcoming MPI standards. OSL researchers continue to play a leading role in MPI-2.2 standardization by co-authoring the collective operation chapter of the new standard. The newest research results will be included in the upcoming MPI-3 standard to enable large-scale program optimization. OSL researchers are also participating in the Fault Tolerance Working Group of the MPI Forum.

In 2008, the OSL reached a major milestone when the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee voted to introduce its language feature "Concepts" into the upcoming revision of the ISO C++ programming language standard. Concepts is the largest and most anticipated language feature included in the new ISO C++ standard, following four years of research spearheaded by OSL to transfer the benefits of the Generic Programming paradigm into a mainstream programming language used daily by millions of software engineers.