MPI Forum: an update

The MPI Forum (http://mpi-forum.org/) is the standardization forum for the Message Passing Interface (MPI). 

INTERTWinE team member Dr Dan Holmes is currently in Dallas, Texas, for the final MPI Forum meeting of 2016.  From there, he has sent the following update:

The MPI Forum is currently very active.  There are some big topics under discussion that will dramatically enhance the ability for MPI to tackle the challenges of Exascale and make MPI attractive to a wider set of applications.  The time-line is beginning to suggest that the next version of MPI will be MPI-3.2 in early 2018 and that MPI-4.0 will be available around 2021.

You can expect to see persistent collective operations, dynamic endpoints, fault tolerance, sessions, and event-driven tools arriving in that time-frame.  There are also other changes that may affect your code, such as the deprecation of send cancel, the introductions of assertions using INFO keys, and clarification of error handlers.

These are interesting times for MPI - if you want to get involved you can participate in the MPI Forum directly or contact us at info [at] intertwine-project.eu