1.6. 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 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).
• Chapter Groups, Contexts, and Communicators , Groups, Contexts, and Communicators, 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 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.
• Annex Language Binding , Language Bindings, gives specific syntax in Fortran 77 and C, for all MPI functions, constants, and types.
• The MPI Function Index is a simple index showing the location of the precise definition of each MPI function, together with both C and Fortran bindings.