A standardized API for implementing the message-passing model.
The parallel programming community recently organised an effort to standardise the communication subroutine libraries used for programming on massively parallel computers such as Intel's Paragon, Cray's T3D, as well as networks of workstations. MPI not only unifies within a common framework programs written in a variety of existing (and currently incompatible) parallel languages but allows for future portability of programs between machines.
An industry-standard message-passing protocol that typically uses a two-sided send-receive model to transfer messages between processes.
A "translator" language that allows different types of computers or processors to communicate and share tasks. Think of MPI as "computer Esperanto."
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a library specification for message-passing, proposed as a standard by a broadly based committee of vendors, implementors, and users. For more information, see http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/. Usually used in conjunction with GRAM.
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a language-independent computer communications descriptive application programmer interface (API) with defined semantics and flexible interpretations; it does not define the protocol by which these operations are to be performed in the sense of sockets for TCP/IP or other layer-4 and below models in the ISO/OSI Reference Model. It is consequently a layer-5+ type set of interfaces, although implementations can cover most layers of the reference model, with sockets+TCP/IP as a common transport used inside the implementation. MPI's goals are high performance, scalability, and portability.