Message Passing Interface - Definition and Overview

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a computer communications protocol. It is a de facto standard for communication among the nodes running a parallel program on a distributed memory system. MPI is a library of routines that can be called from Fortran, C and C++ programs. MPI's advantage over older message passing libraries is that it is both portable (because MPI has been implemented for almost every distributed memory architecture) and fast (because each implementation is optimized for the hardware it runs on).

The most common implementation in use is MPICH. Also available is [[1] (http://www.lam-mpi.org/|LAM-MPI)].

For shared memory systems, OpenMP is the de facto standard for programming on them. There is also another parallel programming model named Unified Parallel C aimed to facilitate the programming on both shared and distributed memory systems.

See also

• Occam
• Linda
• PVM
• Calculus of Communicating Systems
• Calculus of Broadcasting Systems

References

External links

• MPI DMOZ category (http://dmoz.org/Computers/Parallel_Computing/Programming/Libraries/MPI/)
• MPICH (http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/)
• LAM/MPI (http://www.lam-mpi.org/)