Goals

In considering MPI, it is important to understand the goals of the standardization effort, the constraints such an endeavor implies, and the practical constraints under which the committee operated. Some of these are listed below.

• Timely completion of a standard. This meant that only message passing was specified, while other aspects of parallel programming, such as process control, were postponed until the next forum, MPI-2, convenes.
• Design a portable, application programming interface, usable by programmers.
• Allow highly-efficient communications, on many platforms.
• Allow implementations for heterogeneous systems.
• Allow convenient ANSI C and Fortran 77 bindings of the interface.
• Provide an interface that is consistent with a wide variety of hardware organizations and operating system environments.
• Provide a programming interface that does not require the programmer to deal with communication failures.
• Define an interface not too different from current practice.
• The semantics of the interface must be language-independent.
• Allow implementations providing multiple threads of execution within each process.