MPI Forum

MPI was the first effort to produce a message-passing interface standard across the whole parallel processing community.

Sixty people representing forty different organisations -- users and vendors of parallel systems from both the US and Europe -- collectively formed the "MPI Forum".

The discussion was open to the whole community and was led by a working group with in-depth experience of the use and design of message-passing systems (including PVM, PARMACS, and P4).

The two-year process of proposals, meetings and review resulted in a document specifying a standard Message Passing Interface (MPI).