Inside the Message Passing Interface

Chapter 8 A Look Ahead

Any design, however successful it is—and MPI has been remarkably successful thus far—hits boundaries with time. Look at humans: we have been evolving for the past 7 million years, starting with ape-like creatures who left behind only their bones, tools, pictures, and some remote relatives running wild in the forests and savanna. Sometimes they are running wild in the cities, too. Oh well, no politics.

The point is: everything has to adapt or die, and the original design will fail if exposed to conditions too harsh to be accommodated. Imagine humans in space: a couple of years, and cosmic radiation will do its job on anyone. This applies to MPI, too. How far can it go under pressure exerted by extreme scalability, frequency ...