This document describes the Message-Passing Interface ( MPI)
standard, version 2.2.
The MPI standard includes point-to-point message-passing,
collective communications, group and communicator concepts,
process topologies, environmental management,
process creation and management, one-sided communications,
extended collective operations, external interfaces, I/O,
some miscellaneous topics, and a profiling interface.
Language bindings for C, C++ and Fortran are defined.
Technically, this version of the standard is based on
`` MPI: A Message-Passing Interface Standard, version 2.1, June 23, 2008.
The MPI Forum added seven new routines and a number of enhancements and
clarifications to the standard.
Historically, the evolution of the standards is from
MPI-1.0 (June 1994) to MPI-1.1 (June 12, 1995) to
MPI-1.2 (July 18, 1997), with several clarifications and additions
and published as part of the MPI-2 document, to
MPI-2.0 (July 18, 1997), with new functionality, to
MPI-1.3 (May 30, 2008),
combining for historical reasons
the documents 1.1 and 1.2 and some errata
documents
to one combined document,
and to MPI-2.1 (June 23, 2008), combining the
previous documents.
This version, MPI-2.2, is based on
MPI-2.1 and provides
additional clarifications and errata corrections as well as a few
enhancements.
(c) 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997,
2008, 2009
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee.
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is
granted, provided the University of Tennessee copyright notice and the
title of this document appear, and notice is given that copying is by
permission of the University of Tennessee.
Version 2.2: September 4, 2009. This document contains mostly corrections and clarifications to the
MPI 2.1 document. A few extensions have been added; however all
correct MPI 2.1 programs are correct MPI 2.2 programs. New features
were adopted only when there were compelling needs for users, open
source implementations, and minor impact on existing MPI
implementations.
Version 2.1: June 23, 2008. This document combines the previous documents
MPI-1.3 (May 30, 2008)
and MPI-2.0 (July 18, 1997).
Certain parts of MPI-2.0, such as some sections of Chapter 4,
Miscellany, and Chapter 7, Extended Collective Operations have
been merged into the Chapters of MPI-1.3. Additional errata and
clarifications collected by the MPI Forum are also included in
this document.
Version 1.3: May 30, 2008. This document combines the previous
documents MPI-1.1 (June 12, 1995) and the MPI-1.2 Chapter in MPI-2
(July 18, 1997). Additional errata collected by the MPI Forum
referring to MPI-1.1 and MPI-1.2 are also included in this
document.
Version 2.0: July 18, 1997. Beginning after the release of
MPI-1.1, the MPI Forum began meeting to consider corrections and
extensions. MPI-2 has been focused on process creation and
management, one-sided communications, extended collective
communications, external interfaces and parallel I/O. A miscellany
chapter discusses items that don't fit elsewhere, in particular
language interoperability.
Version 1.2: July 18, 1997. The MPI-2 Forum introduced MPI-1.2 as
Chapter 3
in the standard " MPI-2: Extensions to the Message-Passing
Interface", July 18, 1997. This section contains clarifications
and minor corrections to Version 1.1 of the MPI Standard. The only
new function in MPI-1.2 is one for identifying to which version of
the MPI Standard the implementation conforms. There are small
differences between MPI-1 and MPI-1.1. There are very few differences
between MPI-1.1 and MPI-1.2, but large differences between MPI-1.2
and MPI-2.
Version 1.1: June, 1995. Beginning in March, 1995, the Message-Passing Interface Forum reconvened to
correct errors and make clarifications in the MPI document of May 5, 1994,
referred to below as Version 1.0. These discussions resulted in Version 1.1,
which is this document. The changes from Version 1.0 are minor. A version
of this document with all changes marked is available. This paragraph is an
example of a change.
Version 1.0: May, 1994. The Message-Passing Interface Forum (MPIF), with participation from over
40 organizations, has been meeting since January 1993 to discuss and
define a set of library interface standards for message
passing.
MPIF is not sanctioned or supported by any official
standards organization.
The goal of the Message-Passing Interface, simply stated, is to
develop a widely used
standard for writing message-passing programs.
As such the interface should
establish a practical, portable, efficient, and flexible standard
for message-passing.
This is the final report, Version 1.0, of
the Message-Passing Interface Forum. This document contains all the
technical features proposed for the interface. This copy of the draft
was processed by LaTeX on
May 5, 1994.
Please send comments on MPI to
mpi-comments@mpi-forum.org.
Your comment will be forwarded to
MPI Forum
committee members who will
attempt to respond.
Acknowledgments
This document represents the work of many people who have served on
the MPI Forum. The meetings have been attended by dozens of people
from many parts of the world. It is the hard and dedicated work of
this group that has led to the MPI standard.
The technical development was carried out by subgroups, whose work was
reviewed by the full committee. During the period of development of
the Message-Passing Interface ( MPI), many people helped with this
effort.
Those who served as primary coordinators in MPI-1.0 and MPI-1.1 are:
The following list includes some of the active participants in
the MPI-1.0 and MPI-1.1 process not mentioned above.
Ed Anderson | Robert Babb | Joe Baron | Eric Barszcz |
Scott Berryman | Rob Bjornson | Nathan Doss | Anne Elster |
Jim Feeney | Vince Fernando | Sam Fineberg | Jon Flower |
Daniel Frye | Ian Glendinning | Adam Greenberg | Robert Harrison |
Leslie Hart | Tom Haupt | Don Heller | Tom Henderson |
Alex Ho | C.T. Howard Ho | Gary Howell | John Kapenga |
James Kohl | Susan Krauss | Bob Leary | Arthur Maccabe |
Peter Madams | Alan Mainwaring | Oliver McBryan | Phil McKinley |
Charles Mosher | Dan Nessett | Peter Pacheco | Howard Palmer |
Paul Pierce | Sanjay Ranka | Peter Rigsbee | Arch Robison |
Erich Schikuta | Ambuj Singh | Alan Sussman | Robert Tomlinson |
Robert G. Voigt | Dennis Weeks | Stephen Wheat | Steve Zenith |
The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory made the draft available by anonymous FTP mail servers and were instrumental in distributing the document.
The work on the MPI-1 standard was supported in part by ARPA and NSF under grant ASC-9310330, the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center Cooperative Agreement No. CCR-8809615, and by the Commission of the European Community through Esprit project P6643 (PPPE).