Today's guest posting comes from Jesper Larsson Traff; he's Faculty of Informatics, Institute of Information Systems in the Research Group for Parallel Computing at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien).

Have you ever wonderedwhyMPI is designed the way that it is?  The slides below are from Jesper's talk about the History and Development of the MPI standard.  They go into detail about how certain design decisions were made, and why.  Amusingly, I'm in a picture on slide 2.  

Find out what MPI got right (and why), what MPI got wrong (and why), and everything in between.

Why bother re-hashing the history of MPI, you ask?  I think this sums it up nicely (and to be honest, I stole this quote from slide 3!):

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
-George Santyana, The Life of Reason, 1905-1906.

Wise words.