MPI 2.2 is now officially ratified by the MPI Forum!

I just came back from lunch after the MPI Forum meeting in Helsinki. This meeting focused again (the last time) on MPI 2.2. We finished the review of the final document and edited several minor things. Bill did a great job in chairing and pushing the MPI 2.2 work and the overall editing. Unfortunately, we did not meet our own deadlines, i.e., the chapters and reviews were not finished two weeks ago (I tried to push my chapters (5 and 7) as hard as possible, but getting the necessary reviews was certainly not easy). However, the whole document was reviewed (read) by forum members during the meeting and my confidence is high that everybody did a good job.

Here are the results of the official vote on the main document:
yes: 14
no: 1
abstain: 2 (did not participate)

The votes by chapter will be online soon.

The feature-set of the standard did not change. I posted it earlier here and Jeff also. But it’s official now! Implementors should now get everything implemented so that all users can enjoy the new features.

Here is a local copy (mirror) of the official document: mpi-report-2_2.pdf (the creation date might change)

One downside is that we already have errata items for things that were discovered too late in the process. This seems odd, however, we decided that we should not break our own rules. And even if the standard says that an MPI_BOOL is 4 bytes, we had to close the door for changes at some point. The errata (MPI_BOOL is one byte) will be voted on and posted soon on the main webpage.

Rolf will publish the MPI 2.2 book (like he did for MPI 2.1) and it will be available at Supercomputing 2009. I already ordered my copy :).

And now we’re moving on to MPI 3, so stay tuned (or participate in the forum)!

mpi-report-2.2-2009-09-04-as-1book