[dorfsmay]

> I thought MPI was mainly geared towards communication-heavy tasks where the underlying network is specialized

The beauty of mpi is:

  * its definition is completely open

  * it segregate the high level message passing interface from the low level stuff

This means that code that was written on cheap old commodity network gear over tcp/ip will work on brand new specialised hardware using their own protocol. Because it's fully open, any hardware vendor can provide MPI driver for their hardware at virtually no cost.

[dalke]

I think you've omitted something. PVM had that same beauty, but MPI won over PVM. Do you have any idea why?

[dorfsmay]

I'm not sure... My only exposure to HPC was the install of a cluster with MPI over Infiniband. At the time I looked into MPI a bit and played with it at home (over wifi and ethernet).