6.8 Bibliographic Remarks

The best source for information about MPI is the actual reference of the library itself [Mes94]. At the time of writing of this book, there have been two major releases of the MPI standard. The first release, version 1.0, was released in 1994 and its most recent revision, version 1.2, has been implemented by the majority of hardware vendors. The second release of the MPI standard, version 2.0 [Mes97], contains numerous significant enhancements over version 1.x, such as one-sided communication, dynamic process creation, and extended collective operations. However, despite the fact that the standard was voted in 1997, there are no widely available MPI-2 implementations that support the entire set of features specified in that standard. In addition to the above reference manuals, a number of books have been written that focus on parallel programming using MPI [Pac98, GSNL98, GLS99].

In addition to MPI implementations provided by various hardware vendors, there are a number of publicly available MPI implementations that were developed by various government research laboratories and universities. Among them, the MPICH [GLDS96, GL96b] (available at http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich) distributed by Argonne National Laboratories and the LAM-MPI (available at http://www.lam-mpi.org) distributed by Indiana University are widely used and are portable to a number of different architectures. In fact, these implementations of MPI have been used as the starting point for a number of specialized MPI implementations that are suitable for off-the-shelf high-speed interconnection networks such as those based on gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet networks.