Argonne National Laboratory Reports

Message passing is a common method for programming parallel computers. The lack of a standard has significantly impeded the development of portable software libraries for these machines. Recently, an ad-hoc committee was formed to develop a standard for message-passing software for parallel computers. This group first met in April 1992 at a workshop sponsored in part by the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC). Four of the attendees at that meeting produced a draft standard, henceforth referred to as the MPI (Message-Passing Interface) draft standard. After review by a larger group, and significant changes in the document, a meeting was held in November to discuss the MPI draft standard. This document is a result of those discussions; it describes a running implementation of in most of the proposed standard, plus additional routines that were suggested by the discussions at the November meeting