”This was the 16th meeting about the research and development of message-passing communication on parallel systems. Initially, the MPI standard grew from a standard communication package which was developed in the USA”, told Jack Dongarra from University of Tennessee, the general chair of the Euro PVM/MPI conference.

A new standard  – namely MPI 2.2. – was agreed and ratified in the MPI Forum meeting in Helsinki preceding the Euro PVM/MPI conference.

“The MPI 2.2 version is an important step in modernizing the MPI standard.  The changes include updating language support, some scalability issues are addressed, and numerous corrections and clarification are also included.  This paves the way to focus on a broader set of new functionality that may be added to the standard, with nonblocking collectives already being voted into the next version of the standard”,  stated Richard Graham from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, chair of the MPI forum and responsible of for the MPI standard.

“The work with the third version of the MPI standard is already going on. When researchers started to work with the MPI standard there were some 10 to 100 processors that had to work in parallel. These days we are talking about millions of processors that process information in parallel. Researchers are continuously refining and getting new ideas on how to get the MPI standard even better”, Dongarra continued.

The European PVM/MPI Users’ Group conference is a forum for the users and developers of MPI, and other message-passing programming environments. The Euro PVM/MPI 2009 meeting attracted over 60 participants from the USA, Germany, Spain, France, Japan, Ireland, Austria, Mexico, China and Finland.

Video material from the conference is available on http://www.csc.fi/pvmmpi09

CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. is a non-profit limited company administered by the Ministry of Education. Having core competences in modeling, computing and information services, CSC provides versatile IT services, support and resources for academia, research institutes, and companies. CSC provides Finland’s widest selection of scientific software and databases and Finland’s most powerful supercomputers that researchers can use via the Funet network.