Questions tagged [mpi]

MPI is the Message Passing Interface, a library for distributed memory parallel programming and the de facto standard method for using distributed memory clusters for high-performance technical computing. Questions about using MPI for parallel programming go under this tag; questions on, eg, installation problems with MPI implementations are best tagged with the appropriate implementation-specific tag, e.g. MPICH or OpenMPI.

The official documents for MPI can be found at the webpages of the MPI forum; a useful overview is given on the Wikipedia page for MPI. The current version of the MPI standard is 3.0; the Forum is currently working on versions 3.1, which will have smaller updates and errata fixes, and 4.0, which will have significant additions and enhancements.

Open source MPI Libraries that implement the current standard include

• MVAPICH2
• OpenMPI
• MPICH

Versions for most common platforms can be downloaded from the links above. Platform specific implementations are also available from various vendors.

A number of excellent tutorials for learning the basics of MPI programming can be found online, typically at the websites of supercomputing centres; these include (in no particular order):

• A tutorial at NERSC
• A tutorial at LLNL
• One of the CyberInfrastructuro Tutorials @ NCSA (free registration required)

Definitive Book Guide

1. An Introduction to Parallel Programming - Peter Pacheco.
2. Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP - Michael J. Quinn
3. MPI: The Complete Reference (Volume 2) - William Gropp, Steven Huss-Lederman, Andrew Lumsdaine, Ewing L. Lusk, Bill Nitzberg, William Saphir, Marc Snir
4. Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message-Passing Interface - William Gropp, Ewing Lusk, Anthony Skjellum