Happy 25th birthday, MPI!

Just over 25 years ago, in April 1992, Jack Dongarra and David Walker organized an open workshop at Rice University to explore in a large group the idea of a standard interface for message-passing systems. That concept had been brewing for a while, and there was even an early draft of what such a standard might look like. But this workshop was the first time that the wide variety of existing experimental systems, both open and proprietary, had been brought together. The result of that workshop, which featured presentations on multiple vendor-specific and portable systems, was a realization that a great diversity of good ideas existed among then-current message-passing libraries but that the lack of a standard was impeding the progress of parallel computing.