MPI: A STANDARD
MESSAGE PASSING INTERFACE

David W. Walker
Mathematical Sciences Section
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
P. O. Box 2008, Bldg. 6012
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6367
Jack J. Dongarra
Mathematical Sciences Section
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
P. O. Box 2008, Bldg. 6012
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6367
and
Department of Computer Science
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-1301 =5pt

David W. Walker and Jack J. Dongarra

MPI is a proposed standard message passing interface whose use on massively parallel computers and networks of workstations is becoming widespread. The design of MPI was a collective effort involving researchers in the United States and Europe from many organizations and institutions. MPI includes point-to-point and collective communication routines, as well as support for general datatypes, application topologies, and the construction of safe and modular parallel application libraries through the communicator abstraction. While making use of new ideas where appropriate, the MPI standard is based largely on current practice.

• 1 Introduction
• 2 An Overview of MPI
• 3 The Communicator Abstraction
• 4 Point-To-Point Communication
  • 4.1 Communication Modes
  • 4.2 Persistent Communication Requests
• 5 General Datatypes
• 6 Application Topologies
• 7 Collective Communication
  • 7.1 Collective Data Movement Routines
  • 7.2 Global Computation Routines
• 8 Summary
• References