2.14. 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 Partitioned Point-to-Point Communication, Partitioned Point-to-Point Communication, defines a method of performing partitioned communication in MPI. Partitioned communication allows multiple contributions of data to be made, potentially, from multiple actors (e.g., threads or tasks) in an MPI process to a single message.
• Chapter Datatypes, Datatypes, defines a method to describe any data layout, e.g., an array of structures.
• 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).
• 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 Virtual Topologies for MPI Processes, Virtual Topologies for MPI Processes, explains a set of utility functions meant to assist in the mapping of MPI 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 Initialization, Creation, and Management, Process Initialization, Creation, and Management, defines several approaches to MPI initialization, process creation, and process management while placing minimal restrictions on the execution environment.
• 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.
• 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.
• Chapter Deprecated Interfaces, Deprecated Interfaces, 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.
• Chapter Semantic Changes and Warnings, Semantic Changes and Warnings, describes semantic changes from previous versions of MPI.
• 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 general terms and definitions,examples,constants and predefined handles,declarations of C and Fortran types,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 were not included in the MPI standard. They are part of the ``Journal of Development'' (JOD), which was created to capture these ideas and discussions. The JOD is available at https://www.mpi-forum.org/docs.