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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 Communications, 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.
- 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 of 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 Profiling Interface
, Profiling Interface, explains a simple
name-shifting convention that any MPI implementation must support.
One motivation for this is the ability to put performance profiling
calls into MPI without the need for access to the MPI source code. The
name shift is merely an interface, it says nothing about how the actual
profiling should be done and in fact, the name shift can
be useful for other purposes.
- 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 Language Bindings
,
Language Bindings, describes
the C++ binding, discusses Fortran issues,
and describes language interoperability aspects between
C, C++, and Fortran.
The Appendices are:
- Annex Language Bindings Summary
,
Language Bindings Summary,
gives specific syntax in
C, C++, and Fortran,
for all MPI functions,
constants, and types.
- Annex Change-Log
,
Change-Log, summarizes major changes since the previous
version of the standard.
- Several Index pages are showing the locations of examples, constants and predefined handles,
callback routines' prototypes, and all MPI functions.
MPI
provides various interfaces to facilitate interoperability
of distinct MPI implementations. Among these are the canonical
data representation for MPI I/O and for MPI_PACK_EXTERNAL and
MPI_UNPACK_EXTERNAL.
The definition of an actual binding of these interfaces that will
enable interoperability is outside the scope of this document.
A separate document consists of ideas that were discussed in the
MPI Forum 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 non-blocking
collective operations.
- Chapter 8, Real-Time MPI, discusses MPI support for
real time processing.
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