The communicator abstraction that provides support for the design of safe, modular parallel software libraries. General, or derived, datatypes, that permit the specification of messages of noncontiguous data of differing datatypes. Application topologies that specify the logical layout of processes. A common example is a Cartesian grid which is often used in two and three-dimensional problems. A rich set of collective communication routines that perform coordinated communication among a set of processes.
All processes are members of at least one process group.
Within a group each process is assigned a unique rank in the range 0 to n -1, where n is the number of processes in the group. MPI was designed as a message passing interface rather than a complete parallel programming environment, and in its current form intentionally omits many desirable features. These issues, and other possible extensions to MPI, are currently being considered in the MPI-2 effort. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.