WHAT'S NEW IN THE MPI WEB PAGES

Please feel free to contact me if you have something you would like added to this page or would like to make comments (or complaints) about this page. If your browser does not support forms, please send mail to shane@ERC.MsState.Edu (Shane Hebert).

March 2, 1998

• MPI-2 Document The MPI-2 Document in HTML form. The document also exists in postscript form and compressed postscript form.
• Added link to Pallas on Implementations page and Tools and Libraries page.

May 28, 1996

• MPICH/NT is a full implementation of MPI for Windows NT workstations. It is based on MPICH and is available from Mississippi State University. This version supports both shared memory communications within a workstation and TCP/IP communications between processes running on multiple workstations concurrently.

May 21, 1996

• I/O has been included as part of the MPI-2 process.
• Information about the June, 1996 MPI-2 meeting is available.
• The Ohio Supercomputing Center is attempting to maintain a list of all publicly available MPI implementations as well as vital statistics about these implementations.
• The ScaLAPACK library includes a subset of LAPACK (Linear Algebra PACKage) routines redesigned for distributed memory MIMD parallel computers. It is currently written in a SPMD stype using explicit message passing for interprocessor communication. The goal is to have ScaLAPACK routines resemble their LAPACK equivalents as much as possible.

April 15, 1996

• W32MPI is a full implementation of MPI for MS-Win32 Clusters It is based on MPICH and is available from the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra - Portugal and the Universidade de Coimbra - Departamento de Engenharia Informatica - Portugal.

April 1, 1996

• Information about the April 24-26, 1995 MPI-2 meeting is now available.

March 4, 1996

• A new version of the MPI-2 draft is now available.

March 1, 1996

• PGAPack is a general-purpose, data-structure-neutral, parallel genetic algorithm library. It is intended to provide most capabilities desired in a genetic algorithm library, in an integrated, seamless, and portable manner.
• ARCH is a C++-based object-oriented library of tools for parallel programming on machines using the MPI (message passing interface) communication library. Detailed technical information about ARCH is available as a Cornell Theory Center Technical Report (CTC95TR288). is also available.
• OOMPI is an object oriented interface to the MPI-1 standard. While OOMPI remains faithful to all the MPI-1 functionality, it offers new object oriented abstractions which promise to expedite the MPI programming process by allowing programmers to take full advantage of C++ features.
• Added information about the March 1996 MPI-2 meeting.

Feb 19, 1996

• XMPI is an X/Motif based graphical user interface for running and debugging MPI programs. It is implemented on top of LAM, an MPI cluster computing environment, but the interface is generally independent of LAM operating concepts. You write an MPI application in one or more MPI programs, tell XMPI about these programs and where they are to be run, then snapshot the synchronization status of MPI processes throughout the application execution.

Jan 22, 1996

• EPIC is an interactive teaching environment, using WWW to deliver courseware and exercises via a standard web browser. The courseware consists of HTML student notes and a set of exercises which can be attempted interactively from the browser. A course on Writing Message Passing Programs with MPI is available.
• Version 1.0 of SGI's implementation of MPI was released in September and is available for free. You can order it by using the marketing code SC4-PCAS-1.0.
• Aztec is an iterative library that greatly simplifies the parallelization process when solving a sparse linear system of equations Ax = b where A is a user supplied nxn sparse matrix, b is a user supplied vector of length n and x is a vector of length n to be computed. Aztec is intended as a software tool for users who want to avoid cumbersome parallel programming details but who have large sparse linear systems which require an efficiently utilized parallel processing system.
• Active Message Implementation of MPI from Berkeley. The goal of this work is to perform a systematic study on building portable and efficient message passing layers using Active Messages. Active Messages is a simple and efficient communication architecture that exposes the hardware capability and performance. Our approach is to view Active Messages as an instruction set for communication and compose various message passing functions using Active Message primitives.

Jan 10, 1996

• New location for the latest MPI-2 draft document. Added reference to appendix containing an object-oriented C++ class library.

Jan 9, 1996

• The MPI Developers Conference and Users' Group Meeting is a conference for all users of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard and is intended to support the continued development and use of MPI and its extensions. The conference will provide a forum for users from industry, national laboratories, and academia who are using MPI to present their ideas about, and experiences with, MPI.
• Added dates for MPI-2 meetings in March and April.
• Added pointer to the 2nd European MPI Workshop being held in Vienna.

Dec 7, 1995

• Added form that allows people to register this page with url-minder, an e-mail notification service that sends a notification when this page changes.

Nov 29, 1995

• MPIMap, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, lets programmers visualize MPI datatypes. It uses Tcl/Tk, and it runs on parallel computers that use the MPICH implmentation of MPI. The tool lets you select one of MPI's type constructors (such as MPI_Type_vector or MPI_Type_struct) and enter the parameters to the constructor call. It then calls MPI to generate the new type, extracts the type map from the resulting structure, and presents a graphical display of the type map, showing the offset and basic type of each element.

Nov 13, 1995

• The notes of an MPI two day course given at the Edinburgh Parallel Computer Centre are available on the net. The whole course (including slides, solutions to exercises and teachers notes) is also freely available in postscript or framemaker format upon request.

Nov 7, 1995

• MPI-FM is a high-performance port of MPICH for SPARCstation clusters interconnected by Myrinet. It is based on Fast Messages and comes from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Oct 29, 1995

• MPIF is an efficient implementation of MPI from IBM for the IBM SP1/2.

Oct 17, 1995

• STAR/MPI is a system to allow binding of MPI to a generic (STAR) interactive language. GCL/MPI is intended as an easy-to-use master-slave distributed architecture. It combines the feedback of an interactive language (the GCL or AKCL dialect of LISP) with the the use of MPI to take advantage of networks of workstations.
• MPI: The Complete Reference, a book by Steve Otto to be published by MIT.
• A tutorial by William Gropp contains slides for a presentation and is also available as postscript and four-up postscript.
• An "alpha test release" of the BLACS for MPI is available from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. For more information contact R. Clint Whaley (rwhaley@cs.utk.edu).
• The sB_BLAS package is a collection of parallel implementations of the level 3 Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms. All codes were written using MPI. A paper describing this work is also available.
• The Cornell Theory Center maintains a set of MPI Tutorials and Lab exercises. They also maintain a page of MPI related information.

Oct 13, 1995

• A new page on MPI2.
• MPI opening WWW page format has been changed. All web pages have been updated and run through weblint.
• David Sitsky from Australian National University has developed an MPI implementation for the Fujitsu AP1000.
• Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center (EPCC) has worked with Cray Research, Inc. (CRI) to develop an implementation of MPI for the Cray T3D.
• MPI-Kurs is an MPI tutorial in German from Lavrentios Servissoglou.

May 26, 1995

• MPI Cubix is an I/O library for MPI applications. The semantics and language binding reflect POSIX in its sequential aspects and MPI in its parallel aspects. The library is built on a few POSIX I/O functions and each of the POSIX-like Cubix functions translate directly to a POSIX operation on a file system somewhere in the parallel machine. The library is also built on MPI and is therefore portable to any machine that supports both MPI and POSIX.

May 18, 1995

• Changed the layout and format of MPI web pages.

May 16, 1995

• WinMPI is the first MPI implementation for MS-Windows 3.1. It runs on a single IBM compatible PC, no networking is required. WinMPI is based on MPICH.
• The Para++ project provides a C++ interface to the MPI and PVM message passing libraries. Their approach is to overload input and output operators to do communication. Communication then looks like standard C++ IO.
• The Amelia Vector Template Livrary (AVTL) is a polymorphic collection library for distributed memory parallel computers. It is based on ideas from the Standard Template Library (STL) and uses MPI for communication.
• The Cononical Classes for Concurrency Control library contains a set of C++ classes which implement a variety of synchronization and data transmission paradigms. It currently supports both Intel's NX and MPI.

May 2, 1995

• Added blurb about MPI Developers Conference

Apr 13, 1995

• Removed reference to MPI bibliography maintained at MSU. Put in its place a pointer to the list maintained by David Walker.
• New tutorial documents.
  • MPI: From Fundamentals To Applications, A tutorial which is available in a half day version as html and or as postscript. A shorter 90 minute postscript version is also available.
  • An Introduction to the MPI Standard. An introductory paper by Jack Dongarra, Steve Otto, Marc Snir, and David Walker.
  • A talk on MPI. Slides from a talk given by Steve Otto.
• Oak Ridge MPI2 page.

Mar 20, 1995

• Repository for MPI test suites.
• Argonne National Lab MPI 2 page.
• Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre MPI Technology Watch Report.
• ORNL MPI web page.
• Added this page.