MPI – enabling the world’s fastest computers

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“You either had to have fuzzy semantics, which would cause obscure problems in the code, or precise semantics,” which made the program slow down, Gropp says.  He helped develop Chameleon, an Argonne’s portability layer; the CH in MPICH stands for Chameleon.

Eventually, even computer makers saw the need for a common standard, and in April 1992 the late Ken Kennedy, a prominent Rice University computer researcher, organized a meeting to tackle it.  “He was the one who sort of kicked the anthill,” Gropp says.

Later that year an early MPI was issued by Jack Dongarra and David Walker from DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Tony Hey, then at Great Britain’s University of Southampton; and Rolf Hempel, then of GMD, a German math and computing society.  That early MPI was lacking, Gropp says, but it got others interested.  In November 1992, the scientists who used and researched parallel computers joined with hardware firms to found the MPI Forum, dedicated to developing a universal message-passing standard.

ASCR’s flexibility aided MPI

For most of 1993 forum members gathered every six weeks “at the same unappetizing hotel” in northern Dallas, Gropp says.  The location was so remote, “There was really nothing to do … except work on what we were supposed to be doing.” Between those meetings and e-mail exchanges, the group created a draft and presented it at the November Supercomputing 93 conference.  A final version came out the following May.

Every segment of the computer community – researchers, users and vendors – had a stake in MPI’s success.  Nonetheless, “Even when we were done we didn’t know if it would take off,” Gropp says.  After all, other standardization projects had failed to gain wide acceptance.

Gropp and his fellow Argonne researchers had a big role in ensuring MPI avoided that fate.  Early in the process Gropp committed his research group to produce a “rolling implementation” of the standard – applying MPI to programming for testing – “just to try to make sure … we didn’t make some sort of boneheaded mistake,” he says.

Gropp and his fellow Argonne researchers later realized the test could be an enduring contribution.  They released it as MPICH, a full MPI implementation, soon after MPI came out.  Having a full implementation meant programmers could use MPI almost immediately, so the standard didn’t just sit on a shelf.

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