14. Organization of this Document

The following is a list of the remaining chapters in this document, along with a brief description of each.

• Chapter MPI Terms and Conventions , MPI Terms and Conventions , explains notational terms and conventions used throughout the MPI document.
• Chapter Point-to-Point Communication , Point-to-Point Communication , defines the basic, pairwise communication subset of MPI. Send and receive are found here, along with many associated functions designed to make basic communication powerful and efficient.
• Chapter Datatypes , Datatypes , defines a method to describe any data layout, e.g., an array of structures in the memory, which can be used as message send or receive buffer.
• Chapter Collective Communication , Collective Communication , defines process-group collective communication operations. Well known examples of this are barrier and broadcast over a group of processes (not necessarily all the processes). With MPI-2, the semantics of collective communication was extended to include intercommunicators. It also adds two new collective operations. MPI-3 adds nonblocking collective operations.
• Chapter Groups, Contexts, Communicators, and Caching , Groups, Contexts, Communicators, and Caching , shows how groups of processes are formed and manipulated, how unique communication contexts are obtained, and how the two are bound together into a communicator.
• Chapter Process Topologies , Process Topologies , explains a set of utility functions meant to assist in the mapping of process groups (a linearly ordered set) to richer topological structures such as multi-dimensional grids.
• Chapter MPI Environmental Management , MPI Environmental Management , explains how the programmer can manage and make inquiries of the current MPI environment. These functions are needed for the writing of correct, robust programs, and are especially important for the construction of highly-portable message-passing programs.

• Chapter The Info Object , The Info Object , defines an opaque object, that is used as input in several MPI routines.
• Chapter Process Creation and Management , Process Creation and Management , defines routines that allow for creation of processes.
• Chapter One-Sided Communications , One-Sided Communications , defines communication routines that can be completed by a single process. These include shared-memory operations (put/get) and remote accumulate operations.
• Chapter External Interfaces , External Interfaces , defines routines designed to allow developers to layer on top of MPI. This includes generalized requests, routines that decode MPI opaque objects, and threads.
• Chapter I/O , I/O , defines MPI support for parallel I/O.
• Chapter Tool Support , Tool Support , covers interfaces that allow debuggers, performance analyzers, and other tools to obtain data about the operation of MPI processes. This chapter includes Section Profiling Interface (Profiling Interface ), which was a chapter in previous versions of MPI.
• Chapter Deprecated Functions , Deprecated Functions , describes routines that are kept for reference. However usage of these functions is discouraged, as they may be deleted in future versions of the standard.
• Chapter Removed Interfaces , Removed Interfaces , describes routines and constructs that have been removed from MPI. These were deprecated in MPI-2, and the MPI Forum decided to remove these from the MPI-3 standard.
• Chapter Language Bindings , Language Bindings , discusses Fortran issues, and describes language interoperability aspects between C and Fortran.

• Annex Language Bindings Summary , Language Bindings Summary , gives specific syntax in C and Fortran, for all MPI functions, constants, and types.

• Annex Change-Log , Change-Log , summarizes some changes since the previous version of the standard.
• Several Index pages show the locations of examples, constants and predefined handles, callback routine prototypes, and all MPI functions.

A separate document consists of ideas that were discussed in the MPI Forum during the MPI-2 development and deemed to have value, but are not included in the MPI Standard. They are part of the ``Journal of Development'' (JOD), lest good ideas be lost and in order to provide a starting point for further work. The chapters in the JOD are

• Chapter 2, Spawning Independent Processes, includes some elements of dynamic process management, in particular management of processes with which the spawning processes do not intend to communicate, that the Forum discussed at length but ultimately decided not to include in the MPI Standard.
• Chapter 3, Threads and MPI, describes some of the expected interaction between an MPI implementation and a thread library in a multi-threaded environment.
• Chapter 4, Communicator ID, describes an approach to providing identifiers for communicators.
• Chapter 5, Miscellany, discusses Miscellaneous topics in the MPI JOD, in particular single-copy routines for use in shared-memory environments and new datatype constructors.
• Chapter 6, Toward a Full Fortran 90 Interface, describes an approach to providing a more elaborate Fortran 90 interface.
• Chapter 7, Split Collective Communication, describes a specification for certain nonblocking collective operations.
• Chapter 8, Real-Time MPI, discusses MPI support for real time processing.