The Final Steps to MPI 4.0 - and What's Next

Abstract

In the upcoming MPI Forum meeting next week, the MPI-Forum plans to finalize the next version of the MPI Standard, the long awaited MPI 4.0. It will feature many new features, including support for 64bit count arguments - also known as BigCount, support for persistent collectives, a new set of point to point routines enabling partial data transfers - introduced as partitioned communication, the new MPI Sessions concept to enable easier initialization and resource isolation, cleaner error handling as a first step towards supporting fault tolerant applications and the MPI_T Events interface to support a new generation of MPI tools. In this talk I will highlight these features as well as discuss the remaining timeline.

However, MPI 4.0 will likely not be the final version of the MPI Standard, as the MPI Forum continues to evolve the standard - already now, several new ideas and concepts have been proposed to further the MPI Standard beyond 4.0 with a clear view on the Post-Exascale world as well as new communities currently not supported. The success of this activity, however, requires a strong participation by vendors, developers and users in the MPI Forum and I invite all those interested to join us in the MPI Forum through working groups or at the MPI Forum meetings, which are - for the time being - held virtually and are open to all interested participants.

Martin Schulz is a Full Professor and Chair for Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems at the Technische Universität München (TUM), which he joined in 2017, as well as a member of the board of directors at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. Prior to that, he held positions at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Cornell University. He earned his Doctorate in Computer Science in 2001 from TUM and a Master of Science in Computer Science from UIUC. Martin has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and currently serves as the chair of the MPI Forum, the standardization body for the Message Passing Interface. His research interests include parallel and distributed architectures and applications; performance monitoring, modeling and analysis; memory system optimization; parallel programming paradigms; tool support for parallel programming; power-aware parallel computing; and fault tolerance at the application and system level. Martin was a recipient of the IEEE/ACM Gordon Bell Award in 2006 and an R&D 100 award in 2011.