Message Passing Interface Forum
This document describes the Message-Passing Interface ( MPI) standard, version 3.1. 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 and Fortran are defined.
Historically, the evolution of the standards is from MPI-1.0 (May 5, 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. Version MPI-2.2 (September 4, 2009) added additional clarifications and seven new routines. Version MPI-3.0 (September 21, 2012) is an extension of MPI-2.2. This version, MPI-3.1, adds clarifications and minor extensions to MPI-3.0
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Version 3.1: June 4, 2015. This document contains mostly corrections and clarifications to the MPI-3.0 document. The largest change is a correction to the Fortran bindings introduced in MPI-3.0. Additionally, new functions added include routines to manipulate MPI_Aint values in a portable manner, nonblocking collective I/O routines, and routines to get the index value by name for MPI_T performance and control variables.
Version 3.0: September 21, 2012. Coincident with the development of MPI-2.2, the MPI Forum began discussions of a major extension to MPI. This document contains the MPI-3 Standard. This draft version of the MPI-3 standard contains significant extensions to MPI functionality, including nonblocking collectives, new one-sided communication operations, and Fortran 2008 bindings. Unlike MPI-2.2, this standard is considered a major update to the MPI standard. As with previous versions, new features have been adopted only when there were compelling needs for the users. Some features, however, may have more than a minor impact on existing MPI implementations.
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 do not 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. The changes from Version 1.0 are minor. A version of this document with all changes marked is available.
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.
Acknowledgments
This document is the product of a number of distinct efforts in three distinct phases: one for each of MPI-1, MPI-2, and MPI-3. This section describes these in historical order, starting with MPI-1. Some efforts, particularly parts of MPI-2, had distinct groups of individuals associated with them, and these efforts are detailed separately.
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:
| 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).