MPI-3.1

As you probably already know, the MPI-3.0 document was published in September of 2012.

We even got a new logo for MPI-3.  Woo hoo!

The MPI Forum has been busy working on both errata to MPI-3.0 (which will be collated and published as “MPI-3.1”) and all-new functionality for MPI-4.0.

The current plan is to finalize all errata and outstanding issues for MPI-3.1 in our December 2014 meeting (i.e., in the post-Supercomputing lull).  This means that we can vote on the final MPI-3.1 document at the next MPI Forum meeting in March 2015.

MPI is sometimes criticized for being “slow” in development.  Why on earth would it take 2 years to formalize errata from the MPI-3.0 document into an MPI-3.1 document?

The answer is (at least) twofold:

This stuff is really, really complicated.  What appears to be a trivial issue almost always turns out to have deeper implications that really need to be understood before proceeding.  This kind of deliberate thought and process simply takes time.

MPI is a standard.  Publishing a new version of that standard has a very large impact; it decides the course of many vendors, researchers, and users.  Care must be taken to get that publication as correct as possible.  Perfection is unlikely — as scientists and engineers, we absolutely have to admit that — but we want to be as close to fully-correct as possible.

MPI-4 is still “in the works”.  Big New Things, such as endpoints and fault tolerant behavior is still under active development.  MPI-4 is still a ways off, so it’s a bit early to start making predictions about what will/will not be included.