# 4.2. Supported Systems

Operating systems, hardware, and network requirements for this version of Open MPI.

## 4.2.1. Supported Operating Systems

We primarily develop Open MPI on Linux and MacOS.

Other operating systems are supported, however. The exact list of operating systems supported has changed over time (e.g., native Microsoft Windows support was added in v1.3.3, and although it was removed prior to v1.8, is still supported through Cygwin). See the Platform Notes section for a listing of the OSes that that version supports.

Open MPI is fairly POSIX-neutral, so it will run without too many modifications on most POSIX-like systems. Hence, if we haven’t listed your favorite operating system here, it may not be difficult to get Open MPI to compile and run properly. The biggest obstacle is typically the assembly language, but that’s fairly modular and we’re happy to provide information about how to port it to new platforms.

It should be noted that we are quite open to accepting patches for operating systems that we do not currently support. If we do not have systems to test these on, we probably will only claim to “unofficially” support those systems.

## 4.2.2. Supported Hardware Platforms

Essentially all the common platforms that the operating systems listed in the previous section support.

For example, Linux runs on a wide variety of platforms, and we certainly don’t claim to test all of them. Open MPI includes Linux-compiler-based assembly for support of Intel, AMD, ARM, and PowerPC chips, for example.

## 4.2.3. Supported Network Interconnects

See the Platform Notes section for a list of networks supported in this specific release of Open MPI.

The set of commonly-available HPC-class network interconnects has evolved and changed over time.

Reflecting that evolution, each release of Open MPI supports a specific set of such network interconnects. You will need to check the documentation of the version of your Open MPI installation to see which interconnects it supports. A general rule of thumb is that a given Open MPI version tends to support the popular HPC-class interconnects at the time of its release.

This, unfortunately, does mean that Open MPI removes support for networks that are no longer commonly-used in HPC environments. If you still have one of these older interconnects, not all new version of Open MPI may support your interconnect — sorry! This simply reflects the reality of limited development, testing, and maintenance resources.

That being said, contributions are always welcome!.