Abstract

The diverse message passing interfaces provided on parallel and distributed computing systems have caused difficulty in movement of application software from one system to another and have inhibited the commercial development of tools and libraries for these systems. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) Forum has developed a de facto interface standard which was finalised in Q1 of 1994. Major parallel system vendors and software developers were involved in the definition process, and the first implementations of MPI are already appearing. This article presents an overview of the MPI initiative and the standard interface, in particular those aspects which merge demonstrated research with common practice. 1 Introduction The message passing paradigm is the most generally applicable and efficient programming model for parallel machines with distributed memory and has been used widely in parallel and distributed computing systems for some years. The development of parallel computing has bee...

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