Performance oriented
Optimization for low-software overheads in communication path allows near native-level performance
Community driven
Collaboration between industry, laboratories, and academia
Production quality
Developed, maintained, tested, and used by industry and researcher community
API
Exposes broad semantics that target data centric and HPC programming models and applications
Research
The framework concepts and ideas are driven by research in academia, laboratories, and industry
Cross platform
Support for InfiniBand, Cray, various shared memory (x86-64 and PPC), GPUs