MPICH is a freely available, portable implementation of MPI

Message Passing Interface

Message Passing Interface is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers...

, a standard for message-passing for distributed-memory applications used in parallel computing

Parallel computing

Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...

. MPICH is Free Software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 and is available for most flavours of Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 (including Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 and Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

) and Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.

The CH part of the name was derived from "Chameleon", which was a portable parallel programming library developed by William Gropp, one of the founders of MPICH.

The original implementation of MPICH (MPICH1) implements the MPI-1.1 standard. The latest implementation (MPICH2) implements the MPI-2.2 standard.

MPICH2 is one of the most popular implementations of MPI. It is used as the foundation for the vast majority of MPI implementations including IBM MPI (for Blue Gene

Blue Gene

Blue Gene is a computer architecture project to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS . It is a cooperative project among IBM Blue Gene is a computer architecture project to produce...

), Intel MPI, Cray MPI, Microsoft MPI, Myricom MPI, OSU MVAPICH/MVAPICH2, and many others.

MPICH1 channels

• ch_p4 - based on older p4 project (Portable Programs for Parallel Processors), tcp/ip
• ch_p4mpd - p4 with mpd daemons to starting and managing processes
• ch_shmem - shared memory only channel
• globus2 - Globus2

MPICH2 channels

Based on ch3 infrastructure

• Nemesis - Universal, has inter-node modules: elan, GM, IB (infiniband), MX (myrinet express), NewMadeleine, tcp; and several intra-node variants of shared memory for large messages (LMT interface).
• ssm - Sockets and Shared Memory
• shm - SHared memory
• sock - tcp/ip sockets
• sctp - experimental channel over SCTP sockets

MPICH and MPICH2 derivatives

• IBM (MPI for the Blue Gene series)
• Cray (MPI for all Cray platforms)
• SiCortex (MPI SiCortex)
• Microsoft (MPI-MS)
• Intel (Intel MPI)
• NetEffect (MPICH2-NE)
• Qlogic (MPICH2-PSM)
• Myricom (MPICH2-MX)
• Ohio State University (MVAPICH and MVAPICH2)
• University of British Columbia (MPICH2/SCTP)

External links

• MPICH2 Home Page
• MPI standards documents