MPI – enabling the world’s fastest computers

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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.

Gropp and his fellow Argonne researchers developed MPICH as side project to their research on parallel processing tools, which was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR).  Although the ASCR project didn’t specifically mention MPI, “We had the freedom to do the right thing” and work on it, Gropp says.  If ASCR had required a formal proposal for it, “MPI would have died,” he adds.  “To have some flexibility there to pursue this opportunity in the (computing) community was … a tremendous benefit.”

Users embraced MPICH because it has good performance but demands few of the computer’s resources.  The MPI standard also is attractive because:

• It’s portable – it works with many different computer languages.
• It’s fast – each implementation is optimized to run efficiently.
• It supports libraries of subroutines programmers can use “off the shelf.”
• There are multiple open source implementations – users can try it at no cost.
• There is a user community to teach it.

MPI also got a boost soon after its release when the Air Force specified it in a call for weather-modeling software.  That was “a big, welcome surprise,” Gropp says.

MPI research continues

Research to improve MPI continues, much of it with support from ASCR.  The office backs work on multiple implementations, including MPICH and OpenMPI.

Having multiple implementations is good, Gropp says: “It pushes us to do something better.  The users all win from that.” Research has led to new releases, MPI-2 and MPICH-2, that added new features, and “There continues to be more to do to make sure MPI is effective on the next generation of hardware,” Gropp says.

MPI is likely to continue as the dominant message-passing library for parallel programming.  Gropp says he’s been told MPI even runs on satellites.

“I doubt that MPI is used in your bank ATM – although it could be – but in technical computing, it’s everywhere,” he adds.

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