Advanced MPI Programming

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been the de facto standard for parallel programming for nearly two decades now. However, a vast majority of applications only rely on basic MPI-1 features without taking advantage of the rich set of functionality the rest of the standard provides. Further, with the advent of MPI-3 (released in September 2012), a vast number of new features have been introduced in MPI, including efficient one-sided communication, support for external tools, non-blocking collective operations, and improved support for topology-aware data movement. The new MPI-4 standard aims at introducing further improvements to the standard in a number of aspects. This is an advanced-level tutorial that will provide an overview of various powerful features in MPI, especially with MPI-2 and MPI-3, and will present a brief introduction on MPI-4 new features.