MPI-3.1! …not quite yet

The MPI Forum met for our quarterly meeting last week in Portland, Oregon.

The main goal of the meeting was to pass the MPI-3.1 standard into law.  MPI-3.1 contains a bunch of errata from MPI-3.0, and a small number of new things.

Specifically, the changelog in the current MPI-3.1 document lists:

• 21 errata
• 6 minor additions since MPI-3.0

The draft MPI-3.1 document is 764 pages long.

Unfortunately, a few issues were identified in the final review of the 3.1 text.  The Forum, as a whole, was not comfortable “blessing” the document into an enforceable standard before resolving these issues.

To be clear: these are small, minor issues that simply require a little more discussion by the various working groups — there’s no major issues remaining.  We just want a sufficient amount of time to really think through what the Correct solutions are for these issues before making them be “official” in the final 3.1 document.

As I’ve mentioned before, the MPI Forum is a deliberative body — it intentionally uses a slow, thoughtful standardization process.  It is not uncommon to have an “ah ha!” moment weeks after Forum’s in-person meetings have concluded.  Such realizations can only happen if you allow time for thinking about / reflecting upon the deeply technical, complex issues between meetings.

As such, it is quite appropriate to spend a little extra time to make sure that we can get the MPI-3.1 text in as perfect a state as possible before making it official.

If all goes well, we’ll fix these minor issues over the next month or so, and then vote to standardize the MPI-3.1 document at our next meeting in Chicago in June, 2015.

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