The MPI Message Passing Interface Standard

The diverse message passing interfaces provided on parallel and distributed computing systems have caused diiculty 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 nalised in Q1 of 1994. Major parallel system vendors and software developers were involved in the deenition process, and the rst 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.