Some Difficulties with MPI
MPI was designed by the Kitchen Sink approach and has 129 functions and each has many arguments
- This completeness is strength and weakness!
- Hard to implement efficiently and hard to learn all its details
It is not a complete operating environment and does not have ability to create and spawn processes etc.
PVM is the previous dominant approach
- It is very simple with much less functionality than MPI
- However it runs on essentially all machines including heterogeneous workstation clusters
- Further it is a complete albeit simple operating environment
However it seems clear that MPI has been adopted as the standard messaging system by parallel computer vendors