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The publication of the MPI Standard provided many implementation groups with a
clear specification; and several freely available, partially portable
implementations have appeared. Like MPICH, their initial versions were built
on existing portable message-passing systems. They differ from MPICH in
that they focus on the workstation environment, where software performance is
necessarily limited by Unix socket functionality. Some of these systems are
as follows:
LAM [7] is available from the Ohio Supercomputer Center and
runs on heterogeneous networks of Sun, DEC, SGI, IBM, and HP workstations.
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CHIMP-MPI [5] is available from the Edinburgh Parallel
Computing Center and runs on Sun, SGI, DEC, IBM, and HP
workstations, the Meiko Computing Surface machines, and the
Fujitsu AP-1000. It is based on CHIMP [9].
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At the Technical University of Munich, research has been done on a system
for check-pointing message-passing jobs, including MPI.
See [43] and [44].
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Unify [45], available from Mississippi State University, layers
MPI on a version of PVM [20] that has been modified to support
contexts and static groups. Unify allows mixed MPI and PVM calls in the
same program.
Proprietary and platform-specific implementations provided by vendors are
described in Section Status and Plans
.
Up: Background
Next: Portability and Performance
Previous: Development History of MPICH