The Message Passing Interface: Version 4.0 and Beyond

Authors: Martin Schulz (Technical University Munich, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre)

Abstract: The Message Passing Interface (MPI) API is the most dominant programming approach for HPC environments. Its specification is driven by the MPI Forum, an open forum consisting of MPI developers, vendors and users. In this BoF meeting at SC 2021, the MPI Forum will present the recently released Version 4.0 of the MPI standard, discuss its new features and invite the HPC community to provide feedback. Additionally, the BoF is intended to keep the larger HPC community informed about ongoing activities and long-term directions, as well as encourage larger community participation in this crucial standard for the supercomputing community.

Long Description: The Message Passing Interface (MPI) API is the most dominant programming approach for HPC environments. Its specification is driven by the MPI forum, an open forum consisting of MPI developers, vendors and users. In this BoF meeting at SC 2021, the MPI Forum will present the recently released Version 4.0 of the MPI standard, discuss its new features and invite the HPC community to provide feedback, helping guide future extensions.

The BoF will provide an overview of the novel features in MPI 4.0, followed by more detailed briefings of the major concepts, including persistent collectives, partitioned communication, MPI sessions and a new tools interface. In addition, we will also take a look beyond MPI 4.0 and discuss the next planned steps for MPI that are currently under discussion, already focusing on MPI 4.1, and we will solicit feedback for new ideas.

The MPI standardization process and the forum itself are open to anyone interested and new members and new perspectives are always welcome. However, the exact workings of the MPI forum are not widely known, which often hinders interested groups and people from participating. We will use this BoF Meeting to highlight the processes in the MPI forum in an effort to make the process more transparent and to make the forum more approachable for a wider community.

This BoF Meeting continues the tradition of MPI Forum BoFs held for many years, which all have been well attended and widely successful. The session will be led by Martin Schulz, the current chair of the MPI forum, with the help of leading experts on MPI who are active in the MPI forum. The exact list of speakers will be determined closer to SC 2021 based on current topics in the MPI forum. Previous sessions featured speakers included William Gropp, Wesley Bland, Torsten Hoefler, Kathryn Mohror, Tony Skjellum, Ryan Grant, Marc-Andre Herrmanns and Dan Holmes. The discussions in this BoF Meeting will be summarized and will be both available to SC as well as published on the MPI forum website and will be used to inform the members of the MPI forum in their future activities.

URL: http://www.mpi-forum.org/


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