Recently a consortium of computing experts has approved the first upgrade to the venerable Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard since 1997. Ratified September 4 in Dublin, Ireland, MPI version 2.1 introduces modest changes to the standard in anticipation of more ambitious revisions expected in the next couple of years. According to MPI Forum Chairman Rich Graham of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s National Center for Computational Sciences, the 600-page MPI 2.1 is primarily an attempt to clarify and correct errors in the 11-year-old standard.

The standard can be downloaded from here.

The next round of changes to the standard will appear in version 2.2, with that effort spearheaded by Bill Gropp of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Graham hopes the forum will decide on textual changes and application performance interfaces by the end of the year, with final ratification in mid-2009. He noted that those changes will also be relatively minor and easy to implement.

Details of MPI 2.2 effort can be found here.

More fundamental issues will be addressed in MPI 3.0, which the group hopes to ratify by the end of 2010. That standard will tackle a variety of issues, including remote memory access (the ability for one processor to write to another processor’s memory), fault tolerance (the ability to respond to a problem without crashing the application), and non-blocking collectives (methods for simplifying and improving communication within an application).

Details of MPI 3.0 effort can be found here.

Full Story
Source: HPCWire

Related Links
Message Passing Interface Forum Website