Message Passing Interface - History

History

The message passing interface effort began in the summer of 1991 when a small group of researchers started discussions at a mountain retreat in Austria. Out of that discussion came a Workshop on Standards for Message Passing in a Distributor Memory Environment held on April 29–30, 1992 in Williamsburg, Virginia. At this workshop the basic features essential to a standard message-passing interface were discussed, and a working group established to continue the standardization process. Jack Dongarra, Rolf Hempel, Tony Hey, and David W. Walker put forward a preliminary draft proposal in November 1992, this was known as MPI1. In November 1992, a meeting of the MPI working group was held in Minneapolis, at which it was decided to place the standardization process on a more formal footing. The MPI working group met every 6 weeks throughout the first 9 months of 1993. The draft MPI standard was presented at the Supercomputing '93 conference in November 1993. After a period of public comments, which resulted in some changes in MPI, version 1.0 of MPI was released in June 1994. These meetings and the email discussion together constituted the MPI Forum, membership of which has been open to all members of the high performance computing community.

The MPI effort involved about 80 people from 40 organizations, mainly in the United States and Europe. Most of the major vendors of concurrent computers were involved in MPI along with researchers from universities, government laboratories, and industry.

The MPI standard defines the syntax and semantics of a core of library routines useful to a wide range of users writing portable message passing programs in Fortran and C. The MPI effort was conducted and similar spirits of the High-Performance Fortran Forum (HPFF).

MPI provides parallel hardware vendors with a clearly defined base set of routines that can be efficiently implemented. As a result, hardware vendors can build upon this collection of standard low-level routines to create higher-level routines for the distributed-memory communication environment supplied with their parallel machines. MPI provides a simple-to-use portable interface for the basic user, yet powerful enough to allow programmers to use the high-performance message passing operations available on advance machines.

As an effort to create a “true” standard for message passing, researchers incorporated into MPI the most useful features of several systems, rather than choose one system to adopt as a standard. Features were used from systems by IBM, Intel, nCUBE, PVM, Express, P4 and PARMACS. The message passing paradigms is attractive because of a wide portability and can be used in communication for distributed-memory and shared-memory multiprocessors, networks of workstations, and a combination of these elements. The paradigm will not be made obsolete by increases and network speed or by architectural combining shared and distributive memory components.

Support for MPI meetings came in part from ARPA and US National Science Foundation under grant ASC-9310330, NSF Science and Technology Center Cooperative agreement number CCR-8809615, and the Commission of the European Community through Esprit Project P6643. The University of Tennessee also made financial contributions to the MPI Forum.