Future
Some aspects of MPI's future appear solid; others less so. The MPI Forum reconvened in 2007, to clarify some MPI-2 issues and explore developments for a possible MPI-3.
Like Fortran, MPI is ubiquitous in technical computing, and it is taught and used widely.
Architectures are changing, with greater internal concurrency (multi-core), better fine-grain concurrency control (threading, affinity), and more levels of memory hierarchy. Multithreaded programs can take advantage of these developments more easily than single threaded applications. This has already yielded separate, complementary standards for symmetric multiprocessing, namely OpenMP. MPI-2 defines how standard-conforming implementations should deal with multithreaded issues, but does not require that implementations be multithreaded, or even thread safe. Few multithreaded-capable MPI implementations exist. Multi-level concurrency completely within MPI is an opportunity for the standard.
Improved fault tolerance within MPI would have clear benefits for the growing trend of grid computing.
Read more about this topic: Message Passing Interface
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