About OPL

Open Petascale Libraries

The Open Petascale Libraries project is a global initiative, established with the aim of providing a source code repository and binary download site for numerical libraries targeted at the emerging generation of supercomputers. It represents a valuable resource, linking computational scientists with the open-source software community to aid the development of advanced applications software.

Providing a dedicated forum, the OPL project promotes the open exchange of ideas and the collaborative development of general-purpose and application-specific numerical libraries. The libraries will be made available as open-source software, targeted initially at highly parallel computers built from multicore processors. The objective is to help accelerate the practical application of the technology across a multitude of scientific and engineering disciplines.

Scientific and engineering simulation is a key application area for supercomputers. It can play a vital role in addressing some of society’s most pressing problems, such as climate change, seismic prediction, disaster mitigation and the development of innovative renewable energy sources. The capabilities of supercomputers can be harnessed to undertake the modelling of ultra-complex systems, ranging from the impact of new drugs on the human heart to the global behaviour of oceanic currents.

In Astrophysics, supercomputers have applications for research into the origins of matter and the universe, while high-performance computing is a key technology in the bioscience revolution, which is driving new methods of preventative and personalised healthcare. It is also a major contributor to accelerating research and innovation in fields such as advanced engineering and manufacturing, including the development of new materials.

The OPL project aims to help overcome the challenge of developing software in these and other areas of simulation by providing libraries that extract high performance from and can be easily adapted to the underlying computer architecture.

How to Join

If you would like to join the Open Petascale Libraries, then please email us here, indicating your area of research and giving a brief outline of how you or your organisation could contribute to the project. Membership requests are processed via the project’s Steering Committee, who will respond to your request as soon as possible.