Separate HTML for Basic Foil 3 MPI Overview -- Comparison with HPF -- I

Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 10 Oct 1995

Foil 3 MPI Overview -- Comparison with HPF -- I

From Fox Presentation Fall 1995 CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 95. by Geoffrey C. Fox

MPI collected ideas from many previous message passing systems and put them into a "standard" so we could write portable (runs on all current machines) and scalable (runs on future machines we can think of) parallel software

MPI agreed May 1994 after a process that began with a workshop in April 1992

MPI plays same role to message passing systems that HPF does to data parallel languages

BUT whereas MPI has essentially all one could want -- as message passing fully understood

HPF will still evolve as many unsolved data parallel compiler issues

e.g. HPC++ -- the C++ version version of HPF still uncertain
and there is no data parallel version of C due to pointers (C* has restrictions)
HPJava is our new idea
whereas MPI fine with Fortran C or C++ and even Java