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In March 1995, the MPI Forum resumed meeting, with many of its original
participants, to consider extensions to the original MPI Standard. The
extensions fall into several categories:
Dynamic creation of processes (e.g., MPI_SPAWN).
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One-sided operations (e.g., MPI_PUT).
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Extended collective operations, such as collective operations on
intercommunicators.
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External interfaces (portable access to fields in MPI opaque objects).
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C++ and Fortran-90 bindings.
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Extensions for real-time environments.
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Miscellaneous topics, such as the standardization of mpirun, new
datatypes, and language interoperability.
The MPICH project began as a commitment to implement the MPI-1 Standard,
with the aim of assisting in the adoption of MPI by both vendors and users.
In this goal it has been successful. The degree to which MPI-2 functionality
will be incorporated into MPICH depends on several factors:
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The actual content of MPI-2, which is far from settled at this time.
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The degree to which the MPI-2 specification mandates features whose
implementation would be feasible only with major changes to MPICH internals.
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The enthusiasm of MPICH users for the individual MPI-2 features.
At this writing, it seems highly likely that we will extend MPICH to include
dynamic process management as defined by the MPI-2 Forum, at least for the
workstation environment. This extension will not be difficult to do with the
new implementation of the channel interface for TCP/IP networks, and it is the
feature most desired by those developing workstation-network applications. We
expect also to aid tool builders (including ourselves) by providing access to
MPICH internals specified in the MPI-2 ``external interfaces''
specification. For the other parts of MPI-2, we will wait and see.
Up: Status and Plans
Next: Summary
Previous: Planned Enhancements