What is MPI?
MPI stands for Message Passing Interface, a standard for writing portable parallel programs which is well-accepted in the scientific computing community. MPI is implemented as a library of subroutines which is layered on top of a network interface. The MPI standard has provided both C/C++ and Fortran interfaces so all of these languages can use MPI. There are several MPI implementations, including MPICH and LAM-MPI. Specific high-performance interconnect vendors also provide their own libraries – usually a version of MPICH layered on an interconnect-specific hardware library. For SHARCNET Alpha clusters, the interconnect is Quadrics, which provides MPI and a low-level library called “elan”. for Myrinet, the low-level library is MX or GM. In addition to C/C++ and Fortran versions of MPI, there exist other language bindings as well. If you have any special needs, please contact us.
