====== readme for mpi ======

   This directory contains a number of items relating to MPI
   (Message Passing Interface).


The goal of the Message Passing Interface simply stated is to develop a widely
used standard for writing message-passing programs. As such the interface
should establish a practical, portable, efficient, and flexible standard for 
message passing.  The main advantages of establishing a message-passing 
standard are portability and ease-of-use. In a distributed memory communication
environment in which the higher level routines and/or abstractions are
build upon lower level message passing routines the benefits of
standardization are particularly apparent. Furthermore, the definition of a
message passing standard provides vendors with a clearly defined base set
of routines that they can implement efficiently, or in some cases provide
hardware support for, thereby enhancing scalability. 
The MPI standardization effort has involved over 80 people from 40 organizationmainly from the United States and Europe. Most of the major vendors of
concurrent computers have been involved in MPI, along with researchers from
universities, government laboratories, and industry. 
MPI incorporated the most useful features of several previous
systems, rather than choosing any existing system as the standard.
MPI has roots in PVM, Express, P4, Zipcode, and PARMACS, and in systems
sold by IBM, Intel, Meiko Scientific, Cray Research, and nCube.
The effort culminated in the 1994 publication of the MPI 1.0 specification,
which was updated to version 1.1 in June 1995.  MPI 1.1 defines the syntax
and semantics of a core of library routines useful to a wide range of
users writing portable message-passing programs in Fortran 77 or C.
Commercial and freely available implementations of MPI have been available
since 1994.