MPI sought to make use of the most attractive features
of a number of existing message-passing systems, rather than selecting one of
them and adopting it as the standard. Thus, MPI was strongly influenced
by work at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
[1,2], Intel's NX/2 [38], Express
[12], nCUBE's Vertex [34],
p4 [7,8], and
PARMACS [5,9].
Other important contributions have come
from Zipcode [40,41], Chimp [16,17], PVM
[4,14], Chameleon [25], and PICL [24].
The MPI standardization effort involved about 60 people from 40 organizations
mainly from the United States and Europe. Most of the major vendors of
concurrent computers were involved in MPI, along with researchers from
universities, government laboratories, and industry. The standardization
process began with the Workshop on
Standards for Message-Passing in a Distributed Memory Environment,
sponsored by the Center for Research on Parallel Computing, held April 29-30,
1992, in Williamsburg, Virginia
[48]. At this workshop the basic features essential
to a standard message-passing interface were discussed, and a working group
established to continue the standardization process.
A preliminary draft proposal, known as MPI1, was put forward by Dongarra,
Hempel, Hey, and Walker in November 1992, and a revised version was completed
in February 1993 [15]. MPI1 embodied the main features that were
identified at the Williamsburg workshop as being necessary in a message
passing standard. Since MPI1 was primarily intended to promote discussion
and ``get the ball rolling,'' it focused mainly on point-to-point
communications. MPI1 brought to the forefront a number of important
standardization issues, but did not include any collective communication
routines and was not thread-safe.
In November 1992, a
meeting of the MPI working group was held in Minneapolis, at which it was
decided to place the standardization process on a more formal footing, and
to generally adopt the procedures and organization of the High Performance
Fortran Forum. Subcommittees were formed for the major
component areas of the standard, and an email discussion service established
for each. In addition, the goal of producing a draft MPI standard by the Fall
of 1993 was set.
To achieve this goal the MPI working group met every
6 weeks for two days throughout the first 9 months of 1993, and
presented the draft MPI standard at the
Supercomputing 93 conference in November 1993. These meetings and the email
discussion together constituted the MPI Forum, membership of which has been open
to all members of the high performance computing community.
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