MPI-2: Extensions to the Message-Passing Interface

This document describes the MPI-1.2 and MPI-2 standards. They are both extensions to the MPI-1.1 standard. The MPI-1.2 part of the document contains clarifications and corrections to the MPI-1.1 standard and defines MPI-1.2. The MPI-2 part of the document describes additions to the MPI-1 standard and defines MPI-2. These include miscellaneous topics, process creation and management, one-sided communications, extended collective operations, external interfaces, I/O, and additional language bindings.

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Acknowledgments

This document represents the work of many people who have served on the MPI Forum. The meetings have been attended by dozens of people from many parts of the world. It is the hard and dedicated work of this group that has led to the MPI standard.

The technical development was carried out by subgroups, whose work was reviewed by the full committee. During the period of development of the Message Passing Interface ( MPI-2), many people helped with this effort. Those who served as the primary coordinators are:

• Ewing Lusk, Convener and Meeting Chair
• Steve Huss-Lederman, Editor
• Ewing Lusk, Miscellany
• Bill Saphir, Process Creation and Management
• Marc Snir, One-Sided Communications
• Bill Gropp and Anthony Skjellum, Extended Collective Operations
• Steve Huss-Lederman, External Interfaces
• Bill Nitzberg, I/O
• Andrew Lumsdaine, Bill Saphir, and Jeff Squyres, Language Bindings
• Anthony Skjellum and Arkady Kanevsky, Real-Time

The following list includes some of the active participants who attended MPI-2 Forum meetings and are not mentioned above.

The MPI Forum also acknowledges and appreciates the valuable input from people via e-mail and in person.

The following institutions supported the MPI-2 effort through time and travel support for the people listed above.

Argonne National Laboratory
Bolt, Beranek, and Newman
California Institute of Technology
Center for Computing Sciences
Convex Computer Corporation
Cray Research
Digital Equipment Corporation
Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, Inc.
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
General Electric Company
German National Research Center for Information Technology
Hewlett-Packard
Hitachi
Hughes Aircraft Company
Intel Corporation
International Business Machines
Khoral Research
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
MPI Software Techology, Inc.
Mississippi State University
NEC Corporation
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
National Institute of Standards and Technology
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Ohio State University
PALLAS GmbH
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Pratt & Whitney
San Diego Supercomputer Center
Sanders, A Lockheed-Martin Company
Sandia National Laboratories
Schlumberger
Scientific Computing Associates, Inc.
Silicon Graphics Incorporated
Sky Computers
Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation
Syracuse University
The MITRE Corporation
Thinking Machines Corporation
United States Navy
University of Colorado
University of Denver
University of Houston
University of Illinois
University of Maryland
University of Notre Dame
University of San Fransisco
University of Stuttgart Computing Center
University of Wisconsin

MPI-2 operated on a very tight budget (in reality, it had no budget when the first meeting was announced). Many institutions helped the MPI-2 effort by supporting the efforts and travel of the members of the MPI Forum. Direct support was given by NSF and DARPA under NSF contract CDA-9115428 for travel by U.S. academic participants and Esprit under project HPC Standards (21111) for European participants.

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