The attractiveness of the message-passing paradigm at least partially
stems from its wide portability. Programs expressed this way may run
on distributed-memory
multiprocessors, networks of workstations, and combinations of all of these.
In addition, shared-memory implementations,
including those for multi-core processors and hybrid
architectures,
are possible.
The paradigm will not be made obsolete by architectures combining the shared-
and distributed-memory views, or by increases in network speeds. It thus
should be both possible and useful to implement this standard on a great
variety of machines, including those ``machines'' consisting of collections of
other machines, parallel or not, connected by a communication network.
The interface is suitable for use by fully general MIMD programs, as well as
those written in the more restricted style of
SPMD.
MPI provides many features intended to improve performance on
scalable parallel computers with
specialized interprocessor communication
hardware. Thus, we expect that native, high-performance
implementations of MPI will be provided on such machines. At the
same time, implementations of MPI on top of standard Unix
interprocessor communication protocols will provide portability to
workstation clusters and heterogenous networks of workstations.
Up: Contents
Next: What Is Included In The Standard?
Previous: Who Should Use This Standard?
Return to MPI-2.1 Standard Index
Return to MPI Forum Home Page
MPI-2.0 of July 1, 2008
HTML Generated on July 6, 2008