Object Oriented MPI (OOMPI): a class library for the Message Passing Interface

Using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) in C++ has been difficult up to this point, because of the lack of suitable C++ bindings and C++ class libraries. The existing MPI standard provides language bindings only for C and Fortran 77, precluding their direct use in object-oriented programming. Even the proposed C++ bindings in MPI-2 are at a fairly low-level and are not directly suitable for object-oriented programming. In this paper, we present the requirements, analysis and design for Object-Oriented MPI (OOMPI), a C++ class library for MPI. Although the OOMPI class library is specified in C++, in some sense the specification is a generic one that uses C++ as the program description language. Thus, the OOMPI specification can also be considered as a generic object-oriented class library specification which can thus also form the basis for MPI class libraries in other object-oriented languages.