Future
Some aspects of MPI's future appear solid; others less so. The MPI Forum reconvened in 2007, to clarify some MPI-2 issues and explore developments for a possible MPI-3.
Like Fortran, MPI is ubiquitous in technical computing, and it is taught and used widely.
Architectures are changing, with greater internal concurrency (multi-core), better fine-grain concurrency control (threading, affinity), and more levels of memory hierarchy. Multithreaded programs can take advantage of these developments more easily than single threaded applications. This has already yielded separate, complementary standards for symmetric multiprocessing, namely OpenMP. MPI-2 defines how standard-conforming implementations should deal with multithreaded issues, but does not require that implementations be multithreaded, or even thread safe. Few multithreaded-capable MPI implementations exist. Multi-level concurrency completely within MPI is an opportunity for the standard.
Improved fault tolerance within MPI would have clear benefits for the growing trend of grid computing.
Read more about this topic: Message Passing Interface
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“The difference between Pound and Whitman is not between the democrat who in deep distress could look hopefully toward the future and the fascist madly in love with the past. It is that between the woodsman and the woodcarver. It is that between the mystic harking back to his vision and the artist whose first allegiance is to his craft, and so to the reality it presents.”
—Babette Deutsch (1895–1982)
“Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows that the Will’s need to will is no less strong than Reason’s need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Captain Hank Quinlan: C’mon, read my future for me.
Tanya: You haven’t got any.
Captain Hank Quinlan: Hmmm. Whadya mean?
Tanya: Your future is all used up.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1985)