is MPI widely used today in HPC? [closed]

Question

is MPI widely used today in HPC?

Answer 1

A substantial majority of the multi-node simulation jobs that run on clusters everywhere is MPI. The most popular alternatives include things like GASNet which support PGAS languages; the infrastructure for Charm++; and probably linda spaces get an honourable mention, just due to the number of core-hours being spent running Gaussian. In HPC, UPC, co-array fortran/HPF, PVM etc ends up dividing up the tiny fraction that is left.

Any time you read in the science news about a simulation of a supernova, or of formula-one racing teams using simulation to "virtual wind-tunnel" their cars before making design changes, there's an excellent chance that it is MPI under the hood.

It's arguably a shame that it is so widely used by technical computing people - that there aren't more popular general-purpose higher-level tools which get the same uptake - but that's where we are at the moment.