MPI provides an appropriate environment for general-purpose message-passing programs, especially programs with regular communication patterns. MPI's approximately 125 functions save the programmer the burden of implementing common communication structures, such as broadcasts and reductions. However, MPI is reasonably easy to learn, as a complete message-passing program can be written with just six basic functions.
MPI is also a useful communications library for applications that need to be ported to many platforms. Versions of MPI exist for virtually every major platform: message-passing supercomputers, scalable shared-memory machines, symmetric multiprocessors, loosely-coupled workstation clusters, and even individual PCs. With MPI, a programmer can write code once and merely recompile it for each new platform.
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