MPI
Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized and portable message-passing communication protocol specification, commonly used for parallel programming on distributed-memory systems. It defines a rich API for explicit point-to-point and collective communication operations, enabling processes…
Key facts
- First appeared
- 1993
- Category
- technology
- Problem solved
- The fundamental problem MPI was created to solve was the lack of a portable, high-performance, and widely accepted standard for message passing in distributed-memory parallel computing. Before MPI, developers faced a fragmented landscape of proprietary, vendor-specific message-passing libraries, making it nearly impossible to write parallel code that could run efficiently across different supercomputing architectures without extensive rewriting.
- Platforms
- GPUs (via CUDA-aware MPI and similar integrations), Multi-core CPUs, Unix-like supercomputers, Linux-based HPC clusters, Windows-based compute clusters (less common for large-scale)
Related technologies
Notable users
- National Laboratories (e.g., Argonne, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos)
- Automotive industry (e.g., Ford, General Motors)
- Oil and Gas exploration companies
- Aerospace and Defense industries (e.g., Boeing, Lockheed Martin)
- Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology companies
- Weather and Climate Modeling centers (e.g., ECMWF)
- Universities and Research Institutions worldwide