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Thirteen years after the publication of the first MPI (message passing interface)
specification and 17 years after the first published paper on PVM(parallel virtual
machine), MPI and PVM have emerged as standard programming environments
and continue to be the development environment of choice for a large variety of
applications, hardware platforms, and usage scenarios. There are many reasons
behind this success and one of them is certainly the strength of its community.
EuroPVM/MPI is a flagship conference for this community, established as the
premier international forum for researchers, users, and vendors to present their
latest advances in MPI and PVM. EuroPVM/MPI is the forum where fundamental
aspects of message passing, implementations, standards, benchmarking,
performance, and new techniques are presented and discussed by researchers,
developers and users from academia and industry.
EuroPVM/MPI 2007 was organized by INRIA in Paris, September 29 to
October 3, 2007. This was the 14th issue of the conference, which takes place
each year at a different European location. Previous meetings were held in Bonn
(2006), Sorrento (2005), Budapest (2004), Venice (2003), Linz (2002), Santorini
(2001), Balatonf¨ured (2000), Barcelona (1999), Liverpool (1998), Krakow (1997),
Munich (1996), Lyon (1995), and Rome (1994).
The main topics of the meeting were collective operations, one-sided communication,
parallel applications using the message passing paradigm, MPI standard
extensions or evolution, fault tolerance, formal verification of MPI processes,
MPI-I/O, performance evaluation, and hierarchical infrastructures (parallel
computers and Grids).
For this year’s conference, the Program Committee Co-chairs invited six outstanding
researchers to present lectures on different aspects of the message passing
paradigm: Tony Hey, who co-authored the first draft for the MPI standard,
presented “MPI: Past, Present and Future,” Al Geist, one of the authors of PVM,
presented “Sustained PetaScale, the Next MPI Challenge,” Satoshi Matsuoka, a
pioneer of the Grid Computing, presented “The Tsubame Cluster Experience,”
Ewing Lusk, one of the leaders of MPICH, presented “New and Old Tools and
Programming Models for High-Performance Computing,” George Bosilca, one
of the leading members of OpenMPI, presented “The X-Scale Challenge,” and
Bernd Mohr, a pioneer in performance analysis tools for Parallel Computing,
presented “To Infinity and Beyond!?”.
In addition to the conference main track, the meeting featured the sixth
edition of the special session “ParSim 2007 – Current Trends in Numerical Simulation
for Parallel Engineering Environments.” The conference also included
three tutorials, one on “Using MPI-2: A Problem-Based Approach” by William
Gropp and Ewing Lusk, the second by Stephen Siegel on “Verifying Parallel
Programs with MPI-Spin,” and the third by George Bosilca and Julien Langou
on “Advanced MPI Programming.” |